Where is Joe Biden? This weekend he is, of course, on Rehoboth Beach, doing... nothing.
In a new "White House Report Card" by The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard, conservative Jed Babbin and Democat pollster John Zogby issued a letter grade to the befuddled president and made some interesting points - but Zogby misses one important thing.
This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden pretty much hidden away, allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to soak up the public’s and media’s attention as he begins his “quiet quitting” phase.
First, Jed Babbin, who rates the president an "F."
This week was witness to another awful performance by the Biden-Harris team with terrorists coming across the border, $239 million being sent to the Taliban, and the stock market’s reaction only days after President Joe Biden proclaimed that he’d “cured” the economy.
The biggest laugh of the week came when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Biden was so consequential that his mug ought to be on Mount Rushmore with former Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson. She said this after saying that she hadn’t led the opposition campaign that got Joe to end his reelection campaign.
The very idea of Joe Biden going to Mount Rushmore is, as Babbin points out, a real knee-slapper; maybe President Biden's image could be placed on a kind of anti-Rushmore, a monument somewhere in, say, the LaBrea Tar Pits, portraying the most incompetent chief executives in the history of the republic. Joe could take his place there alongside Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Andrew Johnson.
But it's John Zogby's grade and the rationale for it that's interesting; he rates the president a "B," which is apparently down from the last report card.
First-time applications for unemployment were down and the stock markets appear to have stabilized after their meltdown over the last week.
Hezbollah is poised for a major attack on Israel, independent of anything its sponsor wants. There is a lot of anxiety in the region, and once again, the U.S. is in a position with battleships, caches of arms, and advisers to serve as deterrence to fend off a major attack. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grudgingly agreed to go back to negotiations for a ceasefire, but no one believes him. It is a mess waiting to get worse.
Mostly out of sight, President Joe Biden has been insulated from the daily routine of bashing about his age and mental acuity.
OK, to be fair, this is a White House report card and not a Joe Biden report card - but Joe Biden is supposedly the guy in charge, right?
Right?
Because none of that has anything to do with the guy who is supposed to be in charge. Zogby even seems to admit that the main reason the White House rates a "B" is because Joe Biden isn't doing much of anything other than appearing for a few fluff photo ops, in which he still manages to come off badly. And Zogby's evaluation, while seemingly acknowledging this, doesn't list anything positive that the guy who is supposedly sitting at the Resolute Deck has done. The stock markets are stabilized for now, but the White House has nothing to do with short-term market trends. As for Israel and the mess in the Middle East, the Biden administration has handled that horribly.
So Joe makes his "Aw-shucks, hand me some ice cream" appearances, and that's enough for a "B" in this mess?
That, Mr. Zogby, is taking "managing expectations" to a new level; you have set the bar so low that it's somewhere under the seabed in the Challenger Deep.
And that's the disturbing bit. From this evaluation, from a well-known Democrat pollster, we know this: We know where Joe Biden is - Rehoboth Beach - and we know what he's going - nothing. But we don't know who is really in charge, and we don't know what they might be up to. We do know that there seems to be a good number of high-profile Democrats who are, inexplicably, just fine with that.