Noah Rothman here with you one last time before the Morning Jolt’s rightful regent, Jim Geraghty, returns from self-imposed exile next week.
On the menu today: It’s rare for seasoned politicians to be undone by an adversarial interview in a hostile venue. Their guard is up. Their lines are rehearsed. Their interlocutor is often too eager for the gotcha moment. A practiced interviewee can evade even the thorniest direct question. No, it’s the friendly interviews that convince politicians they can skip lackadaisically through political minefields. And every so often, a mine goes off.
Undone by the Weather Channel
Barack Obama was undone by the New Yorker. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a J.V. team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he told David Remnick in 2014 of the emergent terrorist outfit, ISIS. Obama spent the next several weeks cleaning those callous comments up and, ultimately, invalidating them when he was compelled to reintroduce U.S. troops to Iraq just seven months later. Donald Trump stumbles into a scandal almost anytime he sits down with a Fox News Channel host; from his comments likening Russia’s lawless conduct to America’s sins with Bill O’Reilly in 2017 to his callous remarks involving his insistence that one of his campaign surrogates should be put to death in a June sit-down with Bret Baier.
In much the same way as his predecessors, Joe Biden, too, has met his match: The Weather Channel.
On Wednesday, Biden sought to squeeze all the political capital he could out of the fact that it is August and, therefore, very hot. The White House shuttled the president off to Arizona where, flanked by the Grand Canyon, Biden touted his environmental record in what the administration surely thought would be a fluffy interview with Weather Channel meteorologist Stephanie Abrams. But in the conversation, Biden was peppered with so many softballs that he wilted like a dehydrated saguaro cactus.
“What is your administration doing to address environmental justice?” the president was asked. The premise alone — the idea that a global climatological catastrophe hits minorities and lower-income Americans hardest — signaled that this was a safe space for Democratic politicians. But Biden still whiffed on it. “Forty percent of all the funding that goes to those people,” Biden began, before trailing off into a prolonged digression about his childhood in Delaware, where he recalled having to degrease car windshields in the winter due to the ambient oil in the atmosphere. By the time he returned to the premise, he reiterated his intention to direct “40 percent” of something to “frontline communities.” Abrams paused for a full, excruciating second before moving on.
“You promised no new drilling on federal land or offshore,” she said, citing the degree to which “Gen Z” voters are “angry” over his administration’s failure to put a halt to new domestic fossil-fuel extraction. “Can you tell Gen Z that you haven’t broken your promise?” Biden insisted that he hadn’t broken any promise, but only because “the courts overruled me.” Biden added that he “wanted to stop all drilling on the East Coast, and the West Coast, and in the Gulf,” which he did, in fact, attempt in 2021. The judge who blocked it on behalf of the 13 states that sued the administration argued that it would have cost private industry and state governments millions of dollars. Abrams nodded along, however, as Biden talked up private-sector contributions to green technologies, which we must assume offset some of the effects of the administration’s failure to craft an executive order that wouldn’t trigger a court injunction.
Abrams pivoted again. “Mr. President, you called climate change a Code Red for humanity,” she said. “Are you prepared to declare a national emergency with respect to climate change?” To this, the president inexplicably insisted that he had “already done that.” What followed was a litany of barely intelligible responses to questions no one asked: “We’ve conserved more land,” Biden said. “We’ve moved in — we’ve rejoined the Paris Climate Accord,” he averred. “We passed the $368 billion climate-control facility,” he rambled. When pressed again about having already declared a national emergency, which he had not done, Biden insisted that the emergency already exists, but only “practically speaking.”
At this point, the classic friendly interview trap snapped shut on the president. None of his answers satisfied his environmentalist allies. Indeed, they only frustrated them.
“It’s not enough for Biden to ‘practically’ declare a climate emergency,” read a statement from the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s time to officially announce one.” Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute of the Center for Biological Diversity, sounded an even more dire note. “It is a question of survival and every day counts,” she said. “The unfortunate reality is that doing some good things is simply not enough, because we are in a physical climate emergency.” In a subsequent statement, Siegel fumed over the president’s response. “Practically speaking,” she added with palpable contempt, “Biden has devastated communities and wildlife by backing disastrous carbon bombs from Alaska to Appalachia.” The “People vs. Fossil Fuels” coalition of 1,200 environmental-activist groups was similarly incensed. “The president should follow through on his rhetoric and immediately declare a national emergency that would unlock new executive powers to speed up the deployment of clean energy and halt fossil fuel expansion,” the group explained.
The president’s flippant comments court political trouble insofar as they risk alienating voters on his left flank, many of whom are already disappointed with the Biden White House’s environmental record. According to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll released this week, 57 percent of American adults disapprove of the president’s handling of climate change. While 74 percent of adults say they have little to no confidence that the GOP will do much to tackle climate change, 59 percent say the same of the Democratic Party. Moreover, the majority of Americans are unaware of the climate-related spending initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the intention of burying those initiatives in something they chose to call “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
The Post wrings its hands over the uphill battle ahead of Biden in his effort to popularize the contents of legislation Democrats actively sought to hide from the public when they claimed their climate-change bill wasn’t a climate-change bill at all. And now, Biden himself is lamenting the deception in which he and his party are engaged. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden said at a Utah fundraiser on Thursday, “because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth.” Well, that’s just too rich. The thing about the bait-and-switch tactic is that your mark is going to fixate on the bait even past the point at which their bamboozlement is useful.
It’s far more politically dangerous to be perceived as having betrayed a cause to which you paid lip service than to set voters’ expectations low. Scorn is a more powerful emotion than disappointment. Any number of Democratic politicians can speak cogently on climate change to the satisfaction of the party’s voters without going off on ponderous tangents about providing “better lighting” to the rest of the world in order to stave off a climate-inspired refugee crisis. What environmentalist Democrat would watch this interview and be satisfied with Joe Biden as an advocate for their cause?
ADDENDUM: Yesterday’s addendum focused on the disastrous wildfires in Hawaii, which are now blamed for taking at least 55 lives while displacing thousands and doing millions of dollars in property damage. Unfortunately, today’s addendum isn’t any cheerier.
Last year, nearly 50,000 people in the United States took their own lives — a record high, according to the Centers for Disease Control. For adults between the ages of 25 and 44, suicide is now the second leading cause of death. The causes of this crisis — and it is a crisis — are myriad, complex, and overlapping to such a degree that policy-makers are going to struggle to identify them, much less come up with a silver-bullet solution. But being able to talk about it is at least the first step.
Americans experiencing psychological trauma who don’t feel like they have anyone else they can talk to about it can now dial 988 at any time to reach a mental-health specialist. Between that new tool and the increased resources schools are providing for counseling, the positive effects may be becoming measurable. In 2022, those resources contributed to an 8 percent decline in suicides among young people aged ten to 24, according to CDC officials. The first step to getting help is being willing to seek it and, maybe more importantly, destigmatizing the act of asking for it.