Even as the electorate clearly prioritizes the economy, Biden and his party’s candidates insist on ignoring it.
Even as the electorate clearly prioritizes the economy, Biden and his party’s candidates insist on ignoring it.
T he Republican Party is fortunate in its opponents. Having been told as recently as Monday that American voters prioritize the state of the economy over the question of abortion by a ratio of 44:5, the president of the United States has decided to close his party’s febrile midterm campaign by focusing hard on . . . abortion. Even now, with the public roaring its disapproval, Biden is unable to get the message.
“In a major speech three weeks before the midterms, Biden makes it clear that abortion rights is the core Democratic message,” blared the Washington Post on Tuesday. The London Telegraph was more blunt in its assessment: “Joe Biden rallies voters around abortion rights as his party sinks in midterm polls.” Indeed so.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that Biden’s party is sinking because he is focused on abortion. But it is not too simplistic to suggest that, yet again, Biden is focused on the wrong thing. Abortion is not the key issue of our age, however much Biden might wish it were. Nor, for that matter, are any of the other issues that he has attempted to bludgeon to the fore since he took office. The Democratic Party’s sweeping spending agenda has never interested the voting public. Neither has its climate-change obsession, its hostility toward domestic energy production, its crusade for draconian gun control, or its preposterous insistence that its fortunes are inseparable from the fortunes of democracy per se. From Day One, the fate of the Biden presidency has been tied to the fate of the economy. Yet somehow, Biden has never noticed.
Instead, the president has elected to prostrate himself before the leading lights of a progressive movement of which, inexplicably, he remains terrified. Joe Biden won the 2020 election because he recognized that Twitter was not real life. His presidency has foundered because he almost immediately forgot that Twitter was not real life. The input/output mechanisms have been as clear as day: Progressives complain that Biden isn’t talking enough about abortion, so Biden talks more about abortion; progressives insist that Biden ought to break the law on evictions and student loans and vaccine mandates, so Biden breaks the law on evictions and student loans and vaccine mandates; progressives demand that Biden spend $2 trillion in March, then move on to another $6 trillion in June, so Biden gets right on it. Like Ado Annie Carnes in Oklahoma, he’s a boy who cain’t say no. And good lord is he in a fix.
Substantively, it is not at all clear that shifting the focus to abortion will help the Democratic Party, given that the Democratic Party’s approach to abortion politics is absurd. Had the Democrats adopted a moderate position on the issue after Roe was reversed, they could plausibly have divided the GOP and put its candidates on the back foot. But the Democrats did not adopt a moderate position on abortion after Roe was reversed; they adopted an utterly revolting position, which holds that no restrictions on the procedure whatsoever are acceptable, and which assumes that the federal government exists to harass the dissenters, pack the courts with cronies, and deprive the states of their explicit constitutional powers. In Joe Biden’s mind, his crusade for “reproductive justice” is comparable to the fight for civil rights. In reality, it involves every single Democratic candidate for Senate declining to oppose infanticide and party icons such as Stacey Abrams choosing to offer up gems such as this: “Let’s be clear. Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas. It’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs.”
This isn’t an abortion policy; it’s eugenics. In her attempt to square the public’s interest in the economy with the Democratic Party’s desire to talk about abortion, Abrams has finally arrived at the suggestion that the key problem facing America’s families at present is that they didn’t kill their children. It almost reads as parody — like one of those deadpan British sketches in which an economist asks the prime minister whether he’s considered solving the problem of poverty by mass-murdering the poor. The trouble for Biden is that those sketches are jokes, and there’s nothing funny about the Democrats’ abortion policy. The party will soon pay a steep price for its strategic malpractice.