Messaging is Failing, Not Joe Biden

CNN is spending a lot of money and air time trying to convince people Donald Trump is more popular than Joe Biden.

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Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

The billionaire-funded corporate media had its work cut out for it this week when a CNN poll revealed that 46 percent of registered voters prefer any republican candidate for president over Joe Biden. 49 percent apparently believe Biden’s age is the biggest concern.

What this reveals is nothing short of poor messaging on the part of a right-leaning corporate media obsessed with political horse races over policy.

So, since the news isn’t covering them, let’s take a few minutes to break down just some of the significant accomplishments from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats everyone should already know about but likely does not.

Topping the list is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the massive Rooseveltesque landmark legislation that provides the largest investment in history— $385 billion — to fight climate change, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030; lowe energy, prescription drug, and health insurance costs; and reduce the federal deficit by requiring a 15% minimum corporate tax rate on companies that report more than $1 billion in profits, and 1% tax on stock buybacks.

Thanks to a key provision in that law, Medicare is now permitted to start negotiating for more affordable pharmaceutical drugs.

The Education Department, upon a directive from the White House, recently started tightening up years of “historical failures” and administrative errors to automatically forgive student loans — totaling $39 billion — for over 800,000 borrowers who have consistently paid 20 or 25 years of their income-driven repayment plans.

Democrats passed and President Biden signed into law the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, a bill designed to expand health care and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals and burn pits.

More than 600 children have been reunited with the families from which they were separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy.

The “No Surprises Act,” designed to eliminate surprise bills from health insurance providers for out-of-network care, is now law.

All federal employees and federal contractors must be paid at least $15 per-hour minimum wage.

Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act that, among other things, “requires the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to establish the Postal Service Health Benefits Program within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program under which OPM may contract with carriers to offer health benefits plans for USPS employees and retirees.” It also guarantees mail delivery six days per week, and repeals the provisions under the George W. Bush-era Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), requiring the postal service to calculate all its anticipated pension costs for 75 years and set aside five billion dollars per year to cover future employees.

Then there’s “the Safer Communities Act,” the most significant piece of gun safety legislation in 20 years, that includes millions of dollars allocated for mental health, school safety, crisis intervention programs, and incentives for states to incorporate juvenile records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. It also incentivizes more states to pass “red-flag laws,” designed to permit law enforcement or family members to petition courts for temporary firearm removal if individuals pose potential danger to themselves or others, and extends current laws barring convicted felons and those convicted of domestic violence to abusive dating partners with domestic violence convictions or restraining orders, colloquially referred to as the “boyfriend loophole.” Gun purchasers under age 21 now must undergo expanded background checks. “Ghost guns” are now illegal.

We will finally start manufacturing some technology again in America thanks to the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) and Science Act” that will “strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development, science and technology, and the workforce of the future to keep the United States the leader in the industries of tomorrow, including nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.”

We mustn’t ignore it is the same Joe Biden who was so vehemently opposed to marijuana legalization his entire political career and refused to alter his stance even when running for president, issued federal pardons for thousands of Americans with simple marijuana possession convictions, and announced his administration would be taking steps toward marijuana decriminalization.

Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying into federal law the right to same-sex and interracial marriages anywhere in the country, regardless of where the marriages were performed.

Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that includes a reform to the 1887 Electoral Count Act, an important step in helping prevent a repeat of the attempted coup against our government that occurred January 6, 2021.

In the revised law, the vice president’s role in the counting of presidential electoral votes proceedings is now purely ceremonial. Where previously it only took one House member and one senator to object to a state’s slate of electors, kicking off a potentially days-long debate, the new law raises the threshold for an objection to 20% of each chamber’s members.

Joe Biden nominated and got confirmed the first African American woman to the US Supreme Court.

He rallied our allies in defense of Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked aggression.

He ended the 20-year illegal war in Afghanistan — the longest in US history.

Let’s not ignore the fact that, due to the prior administration’s negligence and malice, we unnecessarily lost over half a million of our fellow Americans to a plague, and it was the nascent Biden administration that prioritized the vaccine that returned us to a semblance of normalcy.

We are building more factories now than ever before in our history.

Unemployment is at its lowest point in over half a century.

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You might be asking yourself, “Self, why didn’t I know about all this? Why isn’t the news reporting it?”

One would think that with all the progress, Biden’s numbers would be skyrocketing.

The problem is not lack of progress. It’s getting the word out about it.

The corporate media structure is predicated on ratings, which equal money.

Since most of the wealthiest people have a personal stake in staying as rich as possible while paying next to nothing (and in some cases, actually nothing) in taxes, they naturally gravitate toward the party whose raison d’être lies solely in massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — the republican party.

But there aren’t enough morbidly rich in the country to win all the elections republicans need to hold onto power, so they traditionally resort to fear, outrage, grievance, desire for horse race, racism, and a little salacious conspiracy theory to crank up average voters.

This is where the corporate media is happy to oblige.

The corporations that own the big American media conglomerates thrive on horse race because it’s how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people interested in staying rich (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), their personal fortunes depend on this.

This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.

Put simply, the media is as “liberal” as the corporations that own it.

When was the last time we heard anything on the so-called “liberal” CNN and MSNBC that at the end of his first term, Donald Trump and congressional republicans passed the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, a massive bill that handed a $1.5 trillion dollar permanent tax cut to the morbidly rich and the corporations they use to exploit workers and despoil the environment?

Why would we hear about it when it risks underscoring the greed and corruption animating the billionaires who own the means of messaging?

Best keep quiet about it and get us fighting amongst ourselves about “Critical Race Theory (CRT)”, transgenders in sports, books about LGBTQ+ characters and/or by authors of color, Biden’s age, supposed “failing” poll numbers, and his son Hunter’s laptop.

There is a truly liberal, progressive media, but it does not have nearly the financial capacity nor audience of the over 1,500 right-wing talk radio stations, including several hundred Spanish-language ones.

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 With a media giddy for another republican administration, the Democratic party has a herculean task of hyping Biden’s accomplishments. But without a media infrastructure comparable to the right’s, it’s like screaming into a void.

That doesn’t mean Democratic politicians, officials, and even some media figures aren’t trying to break through.

2024 Democratic convention chairwoman, Minyon Moore, said on NBC:

People talk about his age. But you know what? I come from a family where age is wisdom, knowledge, participation, experience. I would rather have Joe Biden on this field, at this time, than any president.

Former House speaker, Rep Nancy Pelosi, added:

A robust competition is in order when we don’t have a sitting president. A sitting president with the accomplishments of Joe Biden — what’s your point?

In an op-ed for The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote:

The tragedy of Joe Biden is that people see his age, his frailty and his ailing poll numbers and they miss the bigger story. Which is that his has been a truly consequential presidency, even a transformational one. In less than three years, he has built a record that should unify US progressives, including those on the radical left, and devised an economic model to inspire social democratic parties the world over, including here in Britain.

The challenge for Democrats is to use the 14 months between now and election day to get past that, to point out the malignancy of Trump and the danger a second Trump presidency would represent to the republic and the world — and also to make the positive case for what we might call Bidenism. Luckily, that is not a hard case to make.

In a CNN interview with California Rep. Katie Porter (running for the US Senate), Porter — not surprisingly pressed to take the bait about Biden’s age and poll numbers — explained:

[Polls can often include] cross-signals, and I think that’s some of what you see here. I think you hear, if anything, even stronger concerns about President Trump. So what I saw in this poll was actually a lot of consistency from 2020 in terms of who’s supporting President Biden, who’s supporting candidate Trump, and I think we’re going to see a very similar outcome, which is ultimately President Biden being reelected.

CNN host Jake Tapper also tried his best to get Biden’s reelection campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond to pile on the president when he asked, “Do you not acknowledge that the perception of his frailty — perceived frailty — is hurting his campaign? Is hurting his reelection chances?”

Richmond responded:

Now, about the president’s age — voters will see his vigor, voters will see his accomplishments. If you just look at his schedule, he’s traveling around the world over the next four-and-a-half days to continue to show American leadership on the world stage. So when they compare President Biden’s travel to that of Republicans — even Republicans that are running for president — he’s traveling almost 30% more than they are.

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What does a republican alternative offer?

More tax cuts for the wealthy.

A plan to make sure next year’s presidential election is the last free and fair one we will ever have.

Nearly one year ago, Donald Trump returned to the Washington, DC to deliver a rant at the “America First Policy Institute” summit.

First, he called for concentration camps.

Yes, concentration camps, this time for the homeless, in addition to the ones he established for migrants at the Southern border with Mexico.

Combining the human rights violations we committed against Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries and Japanese Americans during World War Two, Trump asserted the government should “remove” thousands of homeless Americans and relocate them to tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” with “permanent bathrooms” and “medical professionals.”

Then, channeling his inner former Philippine president Roderigo Duterte, Trump suggested executing drug dealers.

He praised China’s undemocratic policies toward suspected criminals.

In addition to favoring a return to the racist “stop-and-frisk policies in cities,” Trump insisted that if he were still in office, he would override governors and mayors, and deploy the national guard to high-crime neighborhoods.

He vowed just a couple of weeks ago to lock up his political enemies if ever put again in a position to do it.

This isn’t just Trump — the twice-impeached, four-times indicted sexual- assaulting tax-dodging former slumlord host of Celebrity Apprentice.

What policy does any member of the republican party, presidential candidate or not, have whose primary beneficiary is average working Americans?

The answer is none.

We instead get from them fear, faux outrage, grievance, conspiracy theories, hurtful legislation, hate, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, jingoism, and elitist proto-fascism.

But they can’t come right out and admit that (although they’re close to doing it), so they get us fighting among ourselves. Because when we’re fighting each other, we aren’t demanding billionaires pay their fair share of taxes; we aren’t strengthening collective bargaining power; we aren’t raising the minimum wage; we aren’t demanding an expansion to Social Security; we aren’t fighting to preserve Medicare; we aren’t fighting for better schools, healthcare, or a cleaner environment.

CNN is spending a lot of money and air time trying to convince people Donald Trump is more popular than Joe Biden.

Just what we can expect from a network ordered to tack further to the right in a vain attempt to attract more right-wing audiences.

Old Joe Biden is certainly getting an amazing amount done. 

Not bad for a man who’s going to turn 81 in November.