“It was a roller coaster of common sense and full of vigor!” declared Stephen Colbert, the most-watched late-night talk show host. It went live on Tuesday (1st), right after Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address.
It’s possible that the comedian wasn’t just joking about the age of “Uncle Joe” or the contrast to the lunatic instability of the Trump years. Colbert, who has already shown more common sense than some of the American political press, could be taking a swipe at coverage of the president.
The days leading up to the speech were marked by a focus on Biden’s decline in the polls, with a doomed tone about a presidency doomed to fail. The fixation of commentators and reporters on approval ratings is a lazy vice.
When Winston Churchill led the UK to victory over Hitler, his popularity never dropped below 78%. But weeks after Germany’s surrender, the prime minister and his Conservative Party were swept from power. As a statesman, he was widely admired in times of war. When the Nazi danger passed, voters preferred more government and access to public services — the Labor agenda.
Biden does not rule from an underground bunker like the one used by Churchill in central London during the German blitz. His passionate defense of an international order in which Ukraine’s tragedy is not repeated precludes sending American soldiers back to fight in Europe — at least not now, not in Ukraine.
But Biden took office in a Washington traumatized by the coup attempt with the invasion of the Capitol. He found a White House in chaos, at the end of a year in which Donald Trump preferred to encourage mass death rather than risk his re-election campaign. The pandemic continued to advance in waves in the first year of the Democrat’s government, and the country today approaches the mark of 1 million deaths from Covid. “I know you are tired, frustrated, exhausted,” Biden said in the speech, acknowledging the obvious.
How is it possible to inform the public about the functioning and plans of the government at such a dramatic time as the present, using opinion polls as a compass?
The cracked country that elected Trump and where civic discourse has only deteriorated in the last six years has not presented a president with 85% approval — like the one George Bush Sr. had, in his victory in the Gulf War — since 1991.
Is it legitimate to debate the consequences of discontent expressed in polls? Of course it does, but what happens when 51% of Americans believe the fiction that the country is in a recession or economic depression, as in the poll released this week by USA Today?
The pandemic recession ended in mid-2020 and unemployment is near an all-time low. Even the researchers cannot explain the fact that Biden’s leadership in this Ukraine crisis is not reflected in public opinion.
Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the most important American newspaper, wrote on the social network about the fact that Vladimir Putin had achieved the opposite of what he wanted: he brought the US closer to Europe; increased the presence of American troops on the continent; changed Germany’s stance on defense and the Russian gas pipeline; reversed the rejection of NATO.
The role of Joe Biden, the unpopular, did not deserve mention in the journalist’s analysis.
