If Donald Trump wants to trash Joi Biden, I don’t really mind. That’s what Trump’s supposed to do, right? As for Fox News, if they want to dump on Joe, so what else is new? But when a reporter for CNN like Chris Cillizza writes a story about Joe’s lousy poll numbers and gets it all wrong, then enough is really enough.
I’m referring here to the weekend story by Cillizza which refers to a new poll that has Joe at a 39% approval rate, while 56% of respondents say that he’s failed. If you take the trouble to read down just one paragraph, you find however, that Joe’s approval rate among Democrats is 80%.
Of course, the good news about Joe’s approval rating with Democrats is immediately questioned by Cillizza who points out that 15% of Democratic respondents also believe that Joe has failed. Does Cillizza stop for one second and raise the possibility that the Democrats who don’t like Joe’s performance to date happen to think that he’s not moving far enough to the Left? You think any of those respondents will vote for the GOP? Yea, right.
The problem that the Fake News media has right now with Joe is that if it weren’t for the price of gasoline still going up, they really wouldn’t have anything negative to say about Joe at all. Covid-19 seems finally to be beginning a slow fade, unemployment is still under 5 percent, and by the end of this coming week, there may not be a single airport in Western Europe where any Russian passenger jet will be able to land.
So, Fake News reporters like Cillizza have to come up with something negative about Joe and what could be better than poll numbers which are going to wreck the chances of Democrats holding onto their Congressional seats? If things don’t improve, to quote Cillizza, “Democrats can kiss their House and Senate majorities goodbye.”
They can? Right now, Joe’s overall approval rating and his support among Democrats is just about where Trump’s overall rating and support among Republicans stood when he had been in office for the same number of days in 2018 that Joe has been in office now. And we know what happened to the GOP’s control of the House in 2018.
But there’s one big difference between the polls which found Trump headed for disaster and what the polls predict for Joe in 2022. And the difference, which Cillizza doesn’t bother to mention, is that right now the gap between party affiliation is 9 points in favor of the Democrats – 49% to 40% - which is the widest margin held by either party since the Democrats held the same margin in 2013.
One year ago, party affiliation was tied with each party garnering 45%. Over the past three months, the blue team has picked up four points, the red team has lost four points. So, if you take into account that Joe goes into the electoral situation with a 9-point lead, all of a sudden, his poll numbers don’t look all that bad.
And there’s one other very important point that needs to be made, namely, that what is going on right now in Ukraine would never (read: never) have happened under Trump. I am referring here to the re-birth of Western diplomacy and diplomatic relations that has occurred under Joe. Over the past weekend, there has been a calculated and directed diplomatic assault on Russia which involves so many different strategies and programs that the media hasn’t been able to figure them all out.
And I’m not just talking about the thousand Stinger missiles that are being shipped to Ukraine from Germany and other countries who Trump denigrated and insulted again and again. I’m talking about the fact, for example, that the European Union is going to deny airspace for flights by any Russian commercial jets. Remember when Trump held a Rose Garden event during the 2020 campaign and talked about how the European Union was formed to ‘take advantage’ of the United States?
That was the kind of schmuckiness and stupidity which has come to an end. And if this would be pointed out on occasion by click-bait artists like Chris Cillizza, we’d all be better off.