This was a Biden advertisement? Was this a Biden commercial?
Monday, April 30th You are way too young MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire introduced their regular feature on Axios.com’s “1 Big Thing.” Axios co-founder Mike Allen (a former New York TimesAnd Washington PostReporter) sound like an advertisement for Biden, going on about “Biden’s Success Story” and comparing him to Ronald Reagan.
Allen praised Biden’s “winning streak” in legislation and a “rewiring the economy.”
ALLEN: So we just saw the new investments in chip-making in the U.S. Early, big investments in the U.S. capacity to make vaccines, get ready for the next threat. Of course, the infrastructure bill. And the interesting twist to this, Jonathan, is that there is an America-First populist streak to this.That is more oil drilling, here! More vaccines here! With a possible victory coming up, more clean energy, here! And possibly the biggest in history.
Now, asterisk to this, is so far, President Biden doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of credit for this. He hasn’t explained it as well as he could. However when you add it up, it is a remarkable record.
Biden doesn’t have a story to tell about his success, so liberal journalists are needed.
This boosterism was not gross enough. Then came the Ronald Reagan-like comparisons. Lemire described it as an “unlikely” comparison. This is a mild way of putting it. Allen, a White House “confidant”, was able to get on with his job (or perhaps chief of staff Ron Klain).
ALLEN: Axios headline, Reagan and we are Reagan. That’s what a Biden confidant told me.Let’s see what they are thinking. You and I could say Biden had a series of breaks after not being able to catch a break for a year. Baby formula winding up on his desk. The Biden view is that he is, this is a payoff, a vindication, for playing the long game. So when that confidant said “We are Reagan,” their extension of that was, we had a big plan, and it’s getting in place. And what they say is that President Biden, sticking to his bottom-up, middle-out strategy for the economy, rather than top down, has paid off. That they’ve stuck to that across all of their big issues.
It is more like an economy at the bottom, which drags everyone down and their retirement savings. Then it became really goofy.
ALLEN: And Jonathan, they point us to a poll, in The Washington Post August 1982, 40 years ago this month for the seasoned viewers out there, Barry Sussman byline, one of the classics. And this was a poll with 58 percent of people in August 1982, saying that first-term president Ronald Reagan shouldn’t run again. And of course, as resonance to this, we’ve had a parade of polls, people saying President Biden shouldn’t run again. There’s also a new USA Today-Suffolk poll saying two- thirds of voters don’t think President Biden or former President Trump should run again. They do not want a rematch. And the punchline to this, less than two years after that poll, in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states, the most electoral [college]Votes of every candidate throughout history
Allen added the “asterisk” to indicate that, while Reagan may be viewed by his inner circle as Reagan’s president, there is “great skeptical among voters.”
The MSNBC segment in which Biden is compared to Reagan was partly brought to you by T-Mobile.
About Post Author
