A Coming Summer of Weekend At Biden’s

It seems to be a running pattern, at least going back to February of 2023. The Bureau of Labor Statistics comes out with their monthly jobs report, and then the following month, there is a revision to the previous report. Then again in another month comes a second and final revision. With just a couple of exceptions, the revisions have all trended down for the second half of Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office as president. How significant are the downward revisions? The Tampa Free Press compiled the data from February, 2023 to January, 2024, and the original BLS projection was a gain of just under three million jobs added to the economy. That’s what regime media reports. That’s what Joe Biden and the White House communications shops try to focus on whenever they can. It’s so good, they claim, they would like you to break out into a chorus of “Everything Is Awesome” from the Lego movie. 

But when you compare the original numbers to the revisions, it’s almost half a million fewer jobs over that same period. It’s maddening, and it makes you wonder whether someone is cooking the books to capitalize on it politically, then correcting the numbers back to reality once nobody in media focuses on them anymore. 

That’s pretty much the same routine with Joe Biden speeches these days. The enfeebled President spent Sunday trying to resurrect his support with Black Americans, beginning the day at Morehouse College, then spending the evening in Detroit at a NAACP gala dinner. The matinee event was a pandering mess of a campaign stump speech devoid of anything inspirational, highlighted by a claim that there’s more Morehouse grads running around the White House than Biden knows what to do with. The reality is that the only senior advisor to the president who actually is a Morehouse grad is Cedric Richmond, who used to direct the office of public engagement at the White House. He’s no longer there. He’s been moved to help run the Biden/Harris ’24 campaign, leaving exactly zero Morehouse grads in the White House in influential positions, which apparently is the way Joe Biden likes it. 

But the nightcap in Detroit was other-worldly. How bad was the President during this address? The White House communications shop had to make no less than nine corrections to the official transcript, including a revision to the revision. The transcript ended up looking like a BLS revised jobs report.  

The President claimed he was vice president during the COVID pandemic, when the reality is he was out of government for over three years while the virus shut down the economy in 2020. The White House substituted in recession instead of pandemic, when the context of what Biden said indicated he was talking about the pandemic. 

Biden told the NAACP audience he had saved them $800,000 a year in health insurance premiums. Biden had to eventually correct himself, saying the number was really $8,000 a year. The White House had to revise the revision on the transcript, noting that what he meant to say was he had saved Americans on average $800 a year, or about $66 a month, and I’m not even sure that’s true in a lot of parts of the country. The national average for health care premiums is a record $584 a month, up 4% from last year. Even if the President was trying to tell the Michigan audience their premiums had gone down $800 a year, which again is not what he actually said, the data shows a 2% hike year on year from 2023 for the Wolverine State. It’s just not true. 

Bridge Michigan caught Joe Biden in another lie. He boasted to a largely Black NAACP audience that the racial wealth gap is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The racial wealth gap, of course, is the difference between the average wealth of white Americans and the average wealth of Black Americans. So what does the data show? 

“But analyses from multiple organizations such as the Brookings Institution and the Americans Civil Liberties Union notes that while Black wealth has grown, the gap has also grown wider, from about $124,000 in 1992 to nearly $215,000 in 2022.”

So not only is the racial wealth gap not the lowest it’s been in 20 years, it’s actually getting worse on Biden’s watch. The speech was just an incoherent debacle. After a clunker of a day, the President retreated to his Delaware home for the evening and didn’t get the motorcade started back for the return trip to D.C. until almost 1 pm on Monday. 

Once he made it back to the White House, it was time for him to address the annual Jewish-American Heritage Month event in the Rose Garden. After two cringeworthy speeches in a row, Biden went for the Triple Crown in a 24-hour period and didn’t disappoint those who have come to expect Biden to be an international embarrassment every time he opens his mouth. 

Mentioning noteworthy Jewish-Americans during Jewish-American Heritage Month is a good thing. Recognizing their presence in the audience when they’re actually being held hostage somewhere in Gaza by Hamas terrorists is not. It’s horrifically bad. You’d like to think that a gaffe of this magnitude would have to be the fault of a staffer, but this was all Biden. He just can’t read. He can’t function. He can’t think on his feet. He’s getting worse not just by the day, but seemingly by the hour. 

He also introduced another Jewish-American that is on his staff, Deborah somebody. I have no idea who she is, nor do I have any idea of what she does, because the President was totally incoherent when calling her out. 

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz gets a lot of credit for helping create Jewish-American Heritage Month in May. As a first-term member of Congress, she co-sponsored legislation, got help in the Senate from then-Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, and it got signed into law by George W. Bush. 

Joe Biden got to the part of his introductory remarks where he recognized dignitaries in the audience, and when Wasserman-Schultz came up on the prompter, this is what came out. 

That’s where he froze. He had no idea where he was going at that point, and got stuck almost like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz needing the oil can. He shifted gears and never finished that sentence. Just for the record, Wasserman-Schultz is my age – 57. She was first elected to Congress when she turned 40. She was 42 when she got Jewish-American Heritage Month over the finish line and at the White House for its first celebration with President Bush. She was older than Joe Biden was when he was first elected senator from Delaware. At the age of 12, a peculiar age for which the President seems focused, Wasserman-Schultz was in sixth grade in Melville, New York out on Long Island. If he was just trying to be cute and flattering to Rep. Wasserman-Schultz, it fell flat. 

The first presidential debate is scheduled for June 27th on CNN. That’s 37 days away. Just to show you the progress of decline in the President, here is Joe Biden sitting down with Univision 37 days ago, complaining about Israel’s war in Gaza. 

I disagree with everything Biden said there, but you could at least understand what he was trying to say. Compare that to Sunday. 

When the challenge by Biden, and the acceptance by Donald Trump for the presidential debates went down last week, it appeared that Team Biden tried to set the terms and go first so as not to look like he was hiding from Trump, but believing that Trump would not accept the terms, ultimately letting Biden off the hook. When Trump accepted on Hugh Hewitt’s show an hour after the challenge, the pressure is now squarely on President Biden’s slumping shoulders. If Trump would have issued a demand in his counter offer, it should have been to demand a drug test made public before the debate, because the only way Joe Biden is going to get through a two-hour debate is if he’s hopped up on whatever cocktail his medical staff gave him to get through the State of the Union Address in February. 

In 2020, coming off the pandemic, and probably suffering personally from a case of COVID, Donald Trump was nowhere near his best in his first debate with Joe Biden, and it most likely cost him the election with independents and suburban moms. This time, the roles are reversed. Joe Biden has much more to lose than Donald Trump does with a bad debate performance, and because Biden has to defend an indefensible record as president. 

We talk about looking through the chaos here. Just imagine for a moment the chaos facing Democratic Party apparatchiks if Biden has a senior moment, gets confused without a teleprompter being there, or reacts to the performance enhancers he’ll be on in order to look like he’s got some vigor left in the tank, coming across as old and cranky? Will they make a move to nudge Biden aside and open up the convention? 

This country is facing a crossroads this November as significant as any time in its history. The stakes could not be higher. But setting that aside, the presidential campaigns this cycle on both sides will be studied by political scientists for a very long time.