The Democrats Have a Principal Skinner Problem

I t’s pretty obvious what President Biden could do to boost his approval ratings and improve his party’s rapidly dissolving prospects in the midterms. He could reverse course on some, or many, or all of the bad policy choices that people hate. He could, for instance, go down to the border and outline a harsh new set of policies for cracking down on illegal immigration. He could give a speech blasting away at woke DAs such as Chesa Boudin (San Francisco), George Gascón (Los Angeles), Alvin Bragg (Manhattan), and Larry Krasner (Philadelphia) for being soft on crime and making minority communities much less safe. He could go up to Montana to say he’s restarting the Keystone Pipeline and announce that he’s opening the spigot on American oil and gas development. He could waive the Jones Act to goose the supply chain. To relieve inflationary pressures, he could tell people who have student debt, “The party’s over, pal. Pay up.” He could talk up an austerity budget and/or try to jawbone the Fed into sharply raising interest rates. If he switched sides on even one issue in the culture war, even by giving a speech, it would impress moderates. How about going to Virginia to back parental rights in education and lambast teachers who foist woke sexual politics on third-graders?

I am happy to offer Jumbled Joe this advice because I’m sure he’ll reject it in toto. Three cheers for that, because it means his party is going to meet the midterms like a log heading into a wood chipper. Reasonable Democrats are begging the party to pay heed to what the voters actually want and getting absolutely no traction. “There is as much a plan to win the midterms as there was to airlift Afghans out of Kabul,” one Democratic strategist told the Washington Post.

Instead of slapping down the woketivist far Left, Joe Biden is channeling Principal Skinner and asking himself: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.” To Democrats, voters are children: The wayward ones need to be taught and corrected instead of heeded.

Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party’s media arm (colloquially known as “the media”) are all ignoring the Democratic Party’s policy problem and whining that something called “disinformation” is making their wise policies unpopular. The voters are preparing to punish Democrats because they have supposedly taken to believing stuff that isn’t actually true, so the Democrats feel they must lash out at the unfairness of the information ecosystem rather than looking in the mirror.

So, they’ll start with a concentrated effort to get the New York Times and the Washington Post to apologize for spending three years pursuing a shaggy-dog story about a fictitious illegal conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and then sanction Hillary Clinton for suggesting the 2016 election was illegitimate?

Probably not. “Disinformation” is the new “fake news,” a magical incantation that Democrats use to ward off alarming data. Democrats are working their way up to the belief that any time they lose an election, they should attack Facebook. Hey, guys, why not go after Verizon and Gmail while you’re at it? There are all sorts of ways people spread info around. You’re thinking too small.

Two non-crazy Democrats I find to be essential reads are Ruy Teixeira and Matt Yglesias. Teixeira coined the useful term “the Fox News Fallacy” to describe how Democrats are talking themselves into believing they should dismiss any point raised by Sean Hannity and Co. Is someone on Fox sputtering about illegal immigration? Well, that’s how we know it’s not a real issue! It’s only the highest-rated cable-news channel. Why pay attention?

Yglesias made a cutting point just by quoting a leading Democrat in his newsletter, Slow Boring. It’s an excerpt from Obama foreign-policy kingpin Ben Rhodes’s memoir. Rhodes ventured as far as two states away from home to a B&B in West Virginia while he was working on his book. He discovered that the owner was friendly and chatty and . . . quite angry about rising crime and unchecked illegal immigration. But she was also interested in conspiracy theories about Benghazi, so Rhodes ignored the blinking-neon sign over this little encounter — perfectly normal and reasonable working-class white people hate mass illegal immigration, and each of them lives in a state that gets two Senate seats — and instead convinced himself that the actual takeaway was: “Don’t try to reach these crazy working-class whites, all they care about is Benghazi.”

Yglesias says the Democrats’ obsession with disinformation is a pointless hobby:

I wish Obama had instead said that there’s no evidence that conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent, that deactivating Facebook makes people less knowledgable about politics, that poorly informed people have always been with us, and that one part of politics is delivering quality governing results while the other part is meeting people where they are, not pining for some alternate reality where they have totally different beliefs.

Here’s hoping the White House does not hire Yglesias, Teixiera, or any of the other common-sense Democrats (such as Josh Barro, Nate Silver, and David Shor) who think polls contain useful information about what leaders should do. Instead, White House chief of staff Ron Klain is saying: Steady as she goes, Emmanuel Macron was just reelected in France despite a 36 percent approval rating! For the second time in a row, we’ve got a president who thinks: So many people hate me, I must be doing something right.