Hey Biden, Voters Are Gonna Be On The Side The Border Patrol Here.....And It Won't Even Be A Close Call

Back in April, I complimented President Biden on an effective first 100 days, where both his political messaging and his stewardship of the country were on point.  Every indication was that he was leading us in the direction of putting COVID in the rearview mirror, guiding the American economy into a period of blistering growth, and making investments targeted heavily toward bringing slow-growth jurisdictions into long-term competitiveness.  Fast forward to Biden's 250-day threshold and, regrettably, his job performance is looking considerably less steady.

Some of Biden's troubles are the result of bad luck, but even the most charitable assessments of his handling of the Afghanistan pullout and COVID's Delta strain resurgence make it hard to deny that the administration was caught flat-footed.  When Biden and his flacks insisted for months that the Afghanistan army was poised to sufficiently hold off the Taliban, but the Afghan army folded entirely in 11 days, it was entirely defensible for the country to wonder if anybody in the White House had the vaguest hint of what they were doing.  And when Biden announced the pullout before the Americans were able to be evacuated, a tangible showing of executive incompetence was on full display for the world in the days ahead.

Similarly, the administration's declaration of victory over COVID looks as premature in retrospect as George W. Bush's "mission accomplished" spectacle a couple of months into the war in Iraq.  I was surprised when the CDC declared masking recommendations lifted effective immediately back in May.  I understood the logic, and advocated for it myself on this blog last spring when I said that motivating people to get vaccinated would require a return to normalcy as a reward, but I still figured the lifting of mask usage recommendations would be phased in with some sort of target date, such as July 1st.  I still think that was the right assessment, but when the administration backpedaled on masking recommendations in early August, it didn't inspire confidence that they knew what they were doing.  Similarly, nobody in the administration or the medical apparatus generally seemed to recognize the warning signs of how widespread vaccination resistance would be.  Even my own doctor seemed befuddled last November when I suggested vaccination compliance was poised to become all about politics just like everything else in American life.  And now, here we are, heading into the fall with COVID infection spread every bit as pervasive as it was in the worst months late last year, and no end in sight to this pandemic, with the once-certain economic growth metrics less likely to meet expectations as a consequence.

All of this has led Americans to be pretty grouchy these days, and in the aftermath of their extended cabin fever due to prior lockdowns, their patience is incredibly limited.  The President was always poised to suffer the consequences of this reversal of fortune, and new polling indicates he definitely is as summer shifts to fall.  Ultimately I don't think the humiliation in Afghanistan will be on many people's radar in the voting booth, at least so long as Taliban tomfoolery doesn't manage to stay in the headlines with any level of consistency.  It's a tougher call on COVID.  Once children are able to be vaccinated, and assuming a critical mass of parents are convinced to get their children those needed vaccines, the current national firestorm about divisive mask mandates in schools in perpetuity "should" recede.  But of course it's a fool's errand to think we have this virus figured out, and if September 2022 more closely resembles September 2021 than September 2019 in terms of COVID risk, the issue will continue to haunt the President overseeing its containment.

But the Democrats have additional problems right now that won't be as easily remedied even if the best-case scenario unfolds.  Even after the spring stimulus and the recent bipartisan infrastructure bill, Biden and the Democrats are now pushing another $3.5 trillion spending plan.  And even though I follow politics pretty closely, even I can only cite a few things that are actually in the proposed legislation.  I suspect that most Americans wouldn't be able to identify anything.  Biden and his party have done an incredibly poor job in explaining why voters should support this, especially with its extravagant price tag.  Voters are gonna have a hard time understanding why, even after the costly stimulus and infrastructure bills, the Democrats still aren't even to the halfway point of the spending they want to follow through with in 2021.  Will that tough sell becoming easier if they start giving us thorough explanations of what $3.5 trillion will buy them?  I'm skeptical, and suspect they may well lose support the more they start talking to the American people about it, which is perhaps why they're doing so little talking.  For instance, how many of the nation's 40 million smokers (and tens of millions more vapers) know that the Democrats are planning to shank them with yet another idiotic tobacco tax that manages to both break Biden's tax pledge on those earning under $400,000 per year and also make the budget even more financially dependent upon the diminishing returns of tobacco sales?

Meanwhile, Biden and the Democrats also continue to be plagued by having to play footsie with their unhinged cultural left base.  Whether it be the stay-home-forever "COVID zero" crowd or the racial hucksters continuing to bully us toward balkanization, the neopuritanism of leftist virtue signalling so pervasive online and at college campuses continues to drive Democrats toward defending or dancing around wildly unpopular positions that more voters are associating with their governing philosophy.  The extent of the backlash by the silent majority is so intense that Democrats may actually lose the Virginia Governor's race in November, seen as unthinkable just a couple of months ago and a potentially sober foreshadowing of 2022.

And the most prominent issue in the current headlines where Biden and the Democrats are badly fumbling is the latest "caravan" of asylum-seeking immigrants at the Mexican border.  Going back at least seven years now, a mockery has been made of the existing asylum process and it's being used as a backdoor means for entry into the United States.  A supermajority of Americans realizes that what was considered illegal immigration 10 years ago is now being repackaged as asylum today.  In most cases, it's a distinction without a difference, but Democrats have backed themselves into a corner pretending there is a difference.  In so doing, most Americans now rightly see the Democrats as the pro-illegal immigration party, which they unhelpfully reinforced by advocating for decriminalization of border crossings in the 2020 Presidential primary debates.  And voters don't like it one God damn bit.

As a consequence of this indefensible muddle, Biden has found himself trying to have it both ways with the current group of thousands of mostly Haitian refugees, arbitrarily setting up a different set of rules for the current group and transporting them en masse back to Haiti even though most of them actually migrated here from Chile and Brazil, while also chastising border patrol agents for doing their jobs so as not to upset the cultural left and talking heads in the media who all seem to support de facto open borders.  Make no mistake about it that the messaging from Biden and his party has created an environment where the world's poor believe that he will let them in the country if they make the effort to arrive at our border.  The chaos and squalid conditions on the border that have led to well over a million border crossings in 2021 is entirely the Democrats' fault.  Rather than identifying the structural error in our asylum process last year and advocating for needed reform during the campaign, they invited more of it, and attempted to portray those who could identify the problem as bigots.  

Predictably, Biden and his party are now reaping the seeds they've sown.  The breakdown of our asylum process is worse than ever by no small amount and Biden is scrambling to undo the wreckage of his party's incompetent policy while still failing to acknowledge that the open-border ideologues are disastrously wrong.  What we get instead is yesterday's pathetic press conference that makes border patrol agents on horseback, who were doing their job at Biden's behest, portrayed as the supervillians.  The centerpiece of Biden's message about the breakdown of America's dysfunctional asylum laws is that border patrol agents are monsters, intentionally whipping black people with the reins of their horses as some sort of homage to the glory days of slavery.

But no matter how much the Democrats and the media attempt to sell this spin, I am confident that a supermajority of Americans isn't buying it.  The problem is not border patrol agents on horseback doing their jobs....the problem is an asylum process that Democrats have green-lighted that has fomented a culture of transcontinental migration that is immoral, unsustainable, and radically unpopular.  Biden's approval rating will probably take another hit after that press conference where he deflected blame onto the border patrol.....and he will deserve to.  Unless and until the Democrats become grown-ups on this immigration issue, they're gonna be eviscerated at the ballot box.  And unlike Afghanistan and COVID, which may recede as voting issues in the next 12 months, people aren't likely to forget their association of the Democratic Party with immigration lawlessness, especially since there will probably be a dozen more caravans of asylum-seekers to remind them of it between now and November 2022.