According to this week’s White House Report Card, President Joe Biden is 157 days away from handing over the keys. That’s four years short of his target, but he could hand the keys to a new generation and leave an acceptable legacy.
His long farewell begins on Monday, when he speaks for the last time as president at the Democratic Party Convention. The party elite forced him to resign because they believed his poll numbers were not good enough to beat his challenger and former President Donald Trump.
His successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, has already won the nomination, but the Democratic Party convention was already planned, so the party will go on.
Most polls show her in an even race with Trump, even as her media-fueled momentum has faded. Seven national polls released this week showed a nearly even race, with Harris leading in three of the seven polls.
There were some successes for Biden this week. Inflation appears to be under control and is within the 2% limit that the Federal Reserve wanted to reach before cutting interest rates. Illegal immigration is also closer to Trump-era levels than the horror show of a year ago.
Democratic pollster John Zogby gave the week an “A” grade, citing the good inflation news. Conservative pollster Jed Babbin gave it a “D minus” grade, saying the good economic news could be undone by Harris’ “Soviet-style economic ideas.”
Johannes Zogby
Class: A
The annual increase in inflation continues its downward spiral and is actually at its lowest level in over two years under President Joe Biden. Without disparaging her boss, Vice President Kamala Harris outlined her economic plans, which include a kind of Biden-esque “Building Back Better Even Better,” combining working-class populism with the largesse of the FDR/LBJ/Biden administration.
This week’s polls show her extending her lead over former President Donald Trump nationwide and ahead in several swing states. While some experts had given up on Biden winning any of the southern fringe states, making the northern blue-wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania indispensable, her initial leads in Arizona and Georgia have changed the dynamic.
Harris’ honeymoon will last another week, with the Democratic National Convention set to begin on Monday. Meanwhile, Trump’s behavior continues to be stale and obnoxious.
Biden will make a movie-worthy appearance at the convention, a “Thank you, Joe” event planned for Monday night. To paraphrase Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, “When I was 82, I had a very good week.”
Jed Babbin
Grade: D-
So President Joe Biden is still absent. He is promising to campaign in key states for Vice President Kamala Harris. That will not go down well with anyone, especially not Harris. In the meantime, she imitated Biden’s 2020 campaign by hiding from the press and staying silent about her policies. At least until Friday.
Harris’ economic policies were laid out in a “major” economic speech on Friday. Topping her list was lowering food prices. Food price inflation in particular has been caused by her and Biden’s radical overspending. How will she do that? By implementing a Soviet-style price control regime that puts government pressure on companies that engage in “price gouging.” There is no talk of reducing government spending to reduce inflation. The price controls will mean a reduction in the availability of food, just as it did back in the USSR.
Another of Harris’s key economic goals is to build three million homes for first-time buyers, presumably at government expense. More radical spending means more inflation.
While all this is happening, a major war is likely to break out in the Middle East between Iran and Israel, and Ukraine is invading Russia, with Russia threatening to use force of arms. And no one is home in the White House.
I’m old enough to remember when adults were in charge. Inflation was just a painful memory from the Jimmy Carter era, and we weren’t so weak globally that our enemies thought they could get away with anything. That’s enough to make us miss the Nixon administration.
The Democratic National Convention is next week. How many protesters will show up? It could turn out to be a repeat of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention – also held in Chicago – made fewer headlines than the riots that preceded it.
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Johannes Zogby is the founder of Zogby Survey and a senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His podcast with son, managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Their firm conducts polls for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies.
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner Staff writer and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the administration of former President George HW Bush. Follow him on X @jedbabbin.
