U.S. President Joe Biden has failed on both the domestic and foreign challenges facing the United States. Both his age and increasing difficulty in communicating his positions coherently or consistently have compounded the problems he’s been facing. But according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, if all you read, listen or watch are liberal corporate media outlets, you might not know much about it.
Tobin is joined by Wall Street Journal editorial board member and columnist Kimberley Strassel, author of the new book The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years.
Strassel traces the parallels between Carter’s disastrous presidency and Biden’s record and concludes that the comparison is unfair … to Carter. She believes that while Carter was a terrible president, he was a model of coherency when compared to Biden.
Most of all, even though Carter made terrible mistakes, especially with respect to the Soviet Union, he was at least capable of admitting error and changing his policies, as his shift after the USSR’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan showed. In contrast, Strassel says that Biden has not only been wrong on most issues throughout his long career but has also shown himself incapable of recognizing mistakes or of learning from them.
Strassel says the playbook for America to recover from Biden’s catastrophic administration is the same as it was in 1980 after Carter. What America needs in 2024 is someone who can follow the example of Ronald Reagan and present a positive, inspiring vision for the future while advocating for the free-market principles that helped America flourish in the 1980s.
Though she says former President Donald Trump had a successful presidency up until the COVID epidemic, that was due to him following traditional conservative policies of lowering taxes and deregulation.
And while she shares the concerns of conservatives about the rise of woke ideology, she believes that talking only about that will not lead to electoral victory since Americans need both a positive vision and a program that will lead to economic recovery and growth.
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