What the Pundits Get Wrong about Biden and SOTU: People are Confident in his Policies even if they Don’t Think He is Charismatic

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The State of the Union address contained no surprises. Joe Biden’s policies are by now a known quantity. It is remarkable, however, how much progress he made in implementing them in the first two years of his presidency. Those who saw the Republican Party become the party of “no” under Barack Obama were surprised to find that Biden often got enough GOP senators on the side of his legislation to pass major acts, including the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. Biden also passed bipartisan legislation encouraging the making of computer chips in the US, and protecting gay marriage.

Admittedly, his most ambitious legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with $369 billion for green energy and transportation, was passed by Democrats through budget reconciliation. That is because the GOP is joined at the hip with Big Oil. I predict, however, that the IRA itself will begin altering that equation, creating Big Solar and Big Wind that will donate to both Republican and Democratic campaigns. Republicans at some point will have to choose between backing declining fossil fuels or backing the energy industries of the future.

I said last fall that I thought Biden might be the most consequential president, if we go by landmark legislation, since Lyndon B. Johnson, and nothing has happened since then to change my mind.

The punditocracy does not like Biden, whom they find boring and who does not create enough news splashes to suit them. As both the 2020 election and the midterms demonstrated, the public likes Biden much more than it is willing to admit to pollsters.

Biden benefits from how much parts of the public have come to dislike Republicans, what with their gutting of Roe v. Wade, their embrace of white Christian nationalism, and the toxicity of some of the more vocal MAGA enthusiasts.

CNN’s flash poll of a representative sample of Americans who watched the SOTU speech tells us about these dynamics.

People are not happy about inflation or their wages, but a president has little control over such issues. As Biden noted, inflation is coming down.

Biden also has much lower negatives than did Trump, which matters, because it measures how enthusiastic the opposition is to come out and defeat a candidate. People may not think Biden is a JFK or an Obama. He doesn’t exude charisma. He isn’t exciting. But they think he does a good job leading the country on the whole, and only 38% have no confidence in his leadership. That percentage was often nearly 60% for Trump.

The speech was greeted positively by Democrats, Liberals and the over-65 crowd.

Although young people were not enthusiastic about the speech, 75% of those under 45 believe that Biden’s policies will move the country in the right direction. That is virtually the same as the over-65 viewers.

Ponder that. The young liked the policies but not the speech. Not only that, but the youth showed up for the Democrats in the midterms, helping prevent big losses. It sounds to me as though those under 45 have their heads screwed on right. They don’t find Biden exciting, They thought the SOTU was kind of a bore. But they care about policies, not just personalities or horse races, and they think Biden has the right policies– and they are willing to go to the ballot box to say so. That is what John Kerry did not have in 2004.

Even more astonishing, of self-identified independents only 40% said they thought Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction before listening to the speech, but that shot up to 66% after listening to the SOTU.

So let’s see. Democrats, Liberals and the elderly voters are all firm about Biden’s policies leading the US in the right direction. So are young people under 45. And once they pay attention to what Biden is actually saying and doing, two thirds of independents agree, as well.

That’s it. That’s the election. If those groups feel that way in two years and if Biden runs again, on this evidence he would win.

Bill Barr told Trump in 2020 that he was going to lose, because “the suburbs think you are an asshole.”

Some people are not enthusiastic about Joe Biden. Only a tiny minority of MAGA nut cases think he is an asshole. And that is apparently postmodern politics in a nutshell, courtesy Bill Barr– an expert on and an exemplar of assholery.