So, here’s today’s question: How come with an economy roaring along at pre-Pandemic levels, a Dow Jones index at an all-time high, a workforce where everyone has a job and an international situation where no U.S. troops are getting killed, Joe has such miserable ratings?
And here’s my answer to that question, which requires me to go back and look at events which took place beginning in 1976.
That was the year when vague rumors started floating around in Israel about some back-door discussions with Egypt to come up with a deal on peace. The official Israeli government line was that no peace with Egypt would require Israel to give back the Sinai Peninsula, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had occupied since 1973. Officially, the Egyptian Government said that it would not recognize Israel until the IDF ‘occupation’ of the Sinai came to an end.
At some point as the rumors about a possible peace deal could no longer be ignored, the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, ran a public-opinion poll which asked readers if they supported the idea of Israeli giving back the Sinai in exchange for an open border with Egypt, i.e., trading land for peace.
By a two-to-one margin, the readers who answered this poll said ‘no.’ And since Yedioth Ahronot was the only daily newspaper in Israel that wasn’t owned either by a labor union or a political party, this poll was considered to be an honest representation about how the Israeli population viewed a peace deal with the country’s most formidable enemy.
Then, on November 19, 1977 Anwar Sadat stood up in front of the Egyptian Parliament and announced that he had accepted an invitation from Prime Minister Menachem Begin to come to Jerusalem and begin talking about peace. And at the same time, Menachem Begin stood up in front of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, and announced that he had invited Anwar Sadat to begin peace talks, a process which was successfully concluded by the Campo David accords in 1978.
A week after Sadat and Begin made their dramatic announcements, the newspaper Yedioth Ahronot ran the same reader’s poll again: Should Israel trade land for peace? And this time, by a two-to-one margin, the Israelis who responded to the poll said ‘yes.’
What this shows is that, generally speaking, elected officials in democratic countries don’t follow public opinion by what they say and do so much as they shape and make public opinion by what they say and do.
Why do the polls show Joe with such lousy numbers? Why do polls even show him losing another election to Donald Trump, a guy he beat by more than 7 million votes last year? I’ll tell you why.
Because public opinion today is shaped by what the fake news media says about current events, and the fake news media goes out of its way to be as negative and critical of Joe as it can.
How else do you explain the constant drumbeat of stories about the so-called disorganization and helplessness of Kamala Harris, stories which to quote Grandpa, are nothing but ‘hai cock,’ (read: nonsense?) How else do you explain the so-called schism between ‘progressive’ and ‘mainstream’ Democrats which nevertheless found every Democrat voting for the infrastructure bill?
Bernie Sanders is about as much of a Socialist as Leonard Mermelstein, who happens to be my cat. If Bernie walked into a meeting of a European Socialist party and said, ‘me too,’ he’d be laughed right out of the room.
Donald Trump was absolutely correct when he said that the fake news media owed their increased ratings to him during the 2016 campaign. What else was the fake news media going to talk about – how Hillary was saying the same, warmed-over things that Bill had said on the campaign trail back in 1992?
But guess what? The ‘stop the steal’ narrative has run its course. Even the RNC Chair, Ronna McDaniel, now says that enough is enough.
As we used to say in IT, Donald Trump is toast. And until the GOP figures out who will head their next national ticket, the fake news media needs something or someone to talk about.
And since the last thing the media can do to get any clicks at all is to say something positive about what’s going on, why not spend some time lambasting Joe?
Which is why the polls which show Joe losing an election to Trump are nothing but digital hot air.
Please feel free to respond and tell me that I am completely or even only partially wrong.
Agree. Maybe those groceries are costing a little more (everyone paying a little more on taxes when buying those groceries) and the price of gasoline has gone up (some say over $1.50/gal) so what? We are getting out more, the country is not locked down like it was under Trump and there are lots of jobs.
Just remember to donate to the 2024 Biden campaign. We need a full eight years of this man being president. He's doing a GREAT job.