Stalled: Zogby grades ‘a bad week for Joe Biden'
This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden stumbling out of a troubled week noted most for a surprising pullback in job growth and evidence of growing inflation.
Democratic pollster John Zogby graded a subpar C-, noting the economic troubles faced by the new president. “No matter which you cut it, a bad week for Joe Biden,” he said in his report.
Conservative analyst Jed Babbin added other Biden blunders to his list and grading D-. “You gotta wonder if anyone in the White House has a clue about the real world,” he wrote.
John Zogby
Grade: C-
It was a pretty bad week for Biden.
The Labor Department's report for April showed an increase of only 266,000 new jobs, well below the million or so that economists were expecting. In addition, the job growth for March and April was seriously downgraded from previous numbers. For the moment, at least, U.S. economic growth is sputtering — food for critics who suggest that Biden's unemployment relief is a disincentive for some people to go back to work. That part is debatable, but the new report puts a damper on the administration's argument that the economy is heading toward full steam.
But at the same time, the president is benefiting from the all-out war within the congressional GOP over loyalty to former President Donald Trump. It looks all but certain that Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, will be out of a job next week, replaced by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is not really the darling of conservatives. Lots of drama on that one.
But, no matter which you cut it, it was a bad week for Biden.
Jed Babbin
Grade: D-
This week, there was ample evidence of why White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted that they try to avoid having Biden take impromptu questions from reporters. Biden admitted (accidentally, of course) that America wasn’t a racist country. He also said that under his tax plan, people who make less than $400,000 a year would pay no taxes. Old Joe is apparently quite confused by what his staff is telling him to say and about when and where he’s supposed to wear a mask. He keeps wearing a mask outdoors, which is unnecessary under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s not as funny as Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband kissing while both were wearing masks.
The week, in short, was another dismal one for Biden with bad (no, make that horrendous) decisions on pharmaceutical intellectual property, illegal immigrants flying on commercial airliners, and trying to sucker other countries into undercutting his tax hikes on corporations.
Biden said he wants to waive patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines in accordance with what the World Health Organization desires. This would give away the billions of dollars of research that U.S. companies spent (and received) under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed (which Biden never credits with developing the vaccines). That waiver would give China, India, and South Africa (all of which have a great capacity to make generic drugs) the ability to manufacture U.S. patented vaccines for their own profit. There’s no reason for Biden’s decision because billions of doses of U.S. vaccines are being manufactured in several nations under licensing agreements. The only saving grace is that Germany, which values its intellectual property, objects to the WHO plan and may thus stop it in its tracks.
One of the most outrageous Biden moves is hand-in-glove with the president's open-border policy. Illegal immigrants are reportedly allowed to fly on commercial airliners without proper identification. All they need is a “border crossing card” with the (real or phony) name they used when caught at the border and then released. Think about what that means to security against terrorist attacks using aircraft and couple that thought with the terrorists who have been caught crossing the border (and the certainty that more haven’t been caught).
Far funnier is the idea, pushed by Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that other countries should not cut their taxes on corporate profits while Biden hikes them on U.S. companies (even their overseas operations). Why does either of these dimwits believe that a competing nation wouldn’t undercut our tax rates to benefit its own economy? You gotta wonder if anyone in the White House has a clue about the real world.
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Poll and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His weekly podcast with son and partner Jeremy Zogby can be heard here.
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on Twitter @jedbabbin
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/stalled-zogby-grades-a-bad-week-for-joe-biden
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