‘Sleepy Joe’ Was Just A Charade

sleepy joe biden

By J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

In just 100 days Joe Biden has broken faith with the American electorate.

The candidate who promised a return to “normalcy” is advancing the most radical agenda since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The candidate who pledged to unify the nation is rejecting all compromise.

He is deploying deception and stoking racial tension to divide and conquer America for the left.  

Start with the nation’s most urgent issue, COVID-19. For Biden, evidence that he vanquished the virus is central to projecting an image of an effective leader who can be trusted to make other big changes.

RELATED: The ‘Woke’ Left’s Authoritarian Pandemic Power Grab

Thus, he brazenly declared that Trump had “failed to order enough vaccines” and that when he took office there was “no real plan to vaccinate most of the country.” Vice President Kamala Harris said the administration was “starting from scratch.” 

This was worse than ordinary political spin. It’s a cynical rewriting of history. Even sympathetic fact-checking outfits have debunked these claims.

Biden is also misrepresenting the economic consequences of COVID to justify trillions of dollars in new spending. One hundred days ago, he said in his address to Congress last week, he  inherited “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. … We had to act.” Actually, the U.S. economy was roaring back when he took office.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2021,” according to the advance estimate from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. This comes on the heels of a 4% gain in the last quarter of 2020 and a 33.4% explosion during the third.

The president painted a false picture of a faltering economy to secure $1.9 trillion of “COVID-relief” in March, and is doing the same to demand trillions more for “infrastructure.”

That second package is an extreme exercise in bait-and-switch duplicity. Only about 15% of the spending would fund roads, bridges and other projects commonly understood as infrastructure and generally supported by the American people.

The bulk of the money would go to a liberal wish list of more controversial social programs, making the bill a Trojan horse.

RELATED: What If ‘Domestic FDR’ Biden Becomes ‘Wartime FDR’ Too?

This Orwellian corruption of language is part of a pattern as Biden seeks to change the definition not only of “infrastructure” but also “court packing” and “bipartisanship.”

“What’s become crystal clear is that Biden has redefined bipartisan,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel said to explain why it no longer means support from elected Republicans. “And Washington is slow to catch up to the Biden definition.”

Biden has every right to go for broke with his ambitious agenda, so long as he works within political norms. But he isn’t. Instead, he is bent on gaming the system.

His administration “strongly supports” making Washington, D.C., a state, which would add two more Democrats to the U.S. Senate. He seems intent on enlarging the Supreme Court to ensure his power grabs pass muster with a dangerously politicized judiciary.

After decades of employing it themselves – and as recently as last November – Biden and his fellow Democrats now falsely describe the Senate filibuster, which requires at least 60 votes for the passage of most bills, as a “relic of the Jim Crow era.”

These and other efforts are a response to political math: House Democrats lost seats in the 2020 election, leaving them with the slimmest majority of any party since World War II; and the Senate is evenly divided.

Despite the successful rollout of the COVID vaccine and the growing economy, little more than half the country approves of Biden’s performance so far, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

RELATED: President Biden’s Tax Hike Hits Keep On Coming

Bottom line: Biden lacks the political mandate he needs for his “transformational” agenda. Unlike his Democrat heroes, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, he does not enjoy broad majorities in Congress to get things done.

If he succeeds, it will be through party-line votes.

That’s where the race card comes in. Since roughly half the country opposes his partisan policies, Biden has concluded he must delegitimize his opposition through ugly smears, casting it as a hateful collection of racists.

Hence the effort to suggest all Republicans supported the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; the false description of Georgia’s new voting laws as “Jim Crow in the 21st century”; the claim that white supremacy is our “most lethal terrorist threat”; and the  insistence that the country he has served in high office for more than four decades is riddled with systemic racism.

Biden is using this cynical race-baiting to explain why he can’t deal with Republicans – after all, who can (or should) compromise with haters? – and why passing monumental pieces of legislation through slim partisan votes is necessary.

Turns out Sleepy Joe is an authoritarian demagogue, willing to deceive and divide America to impose his will. Make no mistake, he will continue on this scorched-earth path even if his approval ratings continue to fall. Biden and the Democrat intelligentsia are true believers.

RELATED: Biden’s Radicalism Unmasked

They will push as hard as they can before the midterm elections. If they lose power then, well, that was a small price to pay for their gains.

Syndicated with permission for RealClearWire.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

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