The president’s appearances with actors and celebrities are a desperate attempt to raise his sinking popularity. It’s not working.
The president’s appearances with actors and celebrities are a desperate attempt to raise his sinking popularity. It’s not working.
W hen you’re in a bad situation, you often seek out help. Most people visit friends; some visit therapists. Unpopular politicians, by contrast, get close to celebrities — hoping some of their stardom will rub off onto them, and cure the ailment of public dislike. Recall Donald Trump’s inane meeting with Kanye West in 2018 and, later, his roundtable with Kim Kardashian on criminal-justice reform — both times when his approval ratings were around 40 percent. Hillary Clinton, similarly, marshaled the whole of Hollywood to her campaign in 2016 and was joined by Jay-Z and Beyonce at a massive concert a few nights before Election Day.
For politicians, however, rarely do these crass attempts to share in celebrity appeal work. Trump’s approval ratings didn’t improve with either Kanye or Kimmy K in the Oval Office. As for Hillary, no amount of star power could save her doomed campaign.
Joe Biden seems to have grabbed onto this idea — most recently, with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday night. Currently, Biden’s approval rating sits in the toilet, at a meager 39.7 percent average — worse than Trump’s at a comparable point in his presidency. This underwater score is consistent across all demographic groups — men, women, whites, minorities, college and non-college-educated — per Quinnipiac’s latest poll breakdown. His cascading policy failures — high inflation, high crime, high gas prices, high illegal immigration, goods shortages (e.g., baby formula), and more — have metastasized to drag him down to the doldrums. White House aides are now desperate to turn the ship of state around before it hits the iceberg of midterms in November.
In their desperation, Biden’s team riffed off the old celebrity playbook. Over the last week, the administration has held near back-to-back appearances with celebrities — either with the president himself or at the White House among staff. Jimmy Kimmel is just the latest. The day before, the Academy Award–winning actor Matthew McConaughey stepped into the White House press briefing room and held court with reporters for half an hour to talk about gun violence. From the White House podium, he demanded that Congress raise the gun purchase age to 21. Before that, last Monday, Biden hosted the Korean pop-music group BTS. It’s still unclear what they came for, and what they discussed. Yet Biden’s team was sure to give them time in the briefing room and a photo-op in the Oval Office.
This situation is not unusual, but it is pathetic. Presidential time is precious — to be used wisely on conducting affairs of state to solve the nation’s problems. Negotiating with Congress to pass legislation, for instance, is a wise use of it. Yet instead of doing so, Biden and his team have chosen to spend the last few weeks hobnobbing with celebrities in the public view. Mind you, these are not people with any policy value to the Democrats’ agenda, or who could help achieve deals with Republicans. Does BTS have any political clout or expertise about the United States to advise our president on policy? Are they world historical figures — and not just 15-minute celebrities — worthy of a White House visit? Presidents have met entertainers before (e.g., Elvis and Nixon), but there is a threshold of notability that must be met. BTS doesn’t cross it by any measure, and giving them the honor of an audience was head-scratching. If Biden’s team was trying to shore up support among teenage girls under 15 — the biggest BTS fan base, yet still too young to vote by 2024 — it’s an open question whether he succeeded.
As for McConaughey, he has flirted with politics before, yet shows no signs of translating his acting appeal into the political result of mobilizing voters. Having him speak from the White House podium — as if to give him some government imprimatur — is a neat political trick but didn’t do anything to change the gun debate. Every time he pays lip service to progressive causes, he merely preaches to the choir.
Biden’s appearance on Kimmel’s show, however, was a theater of the absurd. On the show, he absurdly said that overruling Roe v. Wade, as the court may do in Dobbs, would lead to a retraction of other rights — e.g., of gay marriage and mobility across state lines — a bizarre argument if there ever was one. He then asked, out of thin air, “When was the last time you saw a biracial couple on T.V?” I know not what this meant, and still don’t. I don’t think he did, either.
Kimmel’s treatment of him was more egregious. We always expect progressive TV anchors on news and talk shows to treat Democrats with kid gloves. We also hope they can maintain some semblance of neutrality if only for formality. Kimmel, by contrast, blew past that line with the use of the pronoun “we” in his softball questions to Biden: “We won the House, Senate, and White House…what do we do” to organize for action,” he said. Kimmel came across not only as a progressive journalist, but someone firmly in the Biden political camp — looking to promote his agenda at the cost of his opponents. His journalistic ethics, like Biden’s approval ratings, are down the toilet. Kimmel went even further: “We need to start yelling at people!” in response to the Dobbs leak, he said in a message to Democratic activists, one day after a man was caught attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
On a less unhinged scale, however, we should lament the fact that the president of the United States feels he needs celebs so he can look popular in the eyes of the country. Rather than joining the jet set, Biden’s time could be better spent working behind the scenes on policy with Congress to address our economic problems, stop our foreign-policy embarrassments, or . . . something — anything — else. It would help America climb out of the hole that it’s now in and, perhaps, drag his approval rating out of it, as well.