Biden: 'On every major issue, the American people agree with the Democratic Party'

Yes, yes, Joe Biden is a dunce, and he’s objectively wrong; there has rarely been a moment when polls show the American people more firmly opposed to everything his Party stands for, right down to the very crucial question of whether government is too large.  The ObamaCare debacle, which is certainly one of the issues America strenuously disagrees with Team Biden on, has pushed overall disdain for Big Government past 70 percent, a high in recent history.

But what Biden is doing here is not stupid.  It’s dishonest, sure – almost comically so – but to return to a topic I’ve been kicking around a lot lately, it’s an expression of blustery confidence, and a way of minimizing the sort of political beating Republicans often inflict on themselves.  Biden knows the media sure as hell isn’t going to challenge him on these claims, or slap him with the dreaded “out of touch” label for making them, any more than they think Democrats are “out of touch” for telling ObamaCare victims to pound sand and stop whining about losing their insurance or doctors.  

From The Blaze:

“For the first time in my career, Nancy, on every major issue, the American people agree with the Democratic Party,” Biden said, referring to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “I know that sounds like hyperbole, but think about it, every issue facing the American people, particularly the embattled middle class.”

Biden was speaking at the House Democrats Issues Conference in Cambridge, Md., Friday morning.

Biden noted that Republicans gave in to Democrats on the debt ceiling, before rattling off several matters that he said Democrats have an edge on.

“The minimum wage, 72 percent of the American people support an increase in the minimum wage; early childhood education, 86 percent of the American people; immigration reform, 72 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Republicans; background checks on weapons, 90 percent of the American people; infrastructure, 88 percent of the American people think it is a means by which we can grow the country,” Biden said. “The American people agree with us, 55 percent on marriage equality. Overwhelmingly they agree with us on pay equity.”

Some of the items he ticked off are true, based on current polling data (“marriage equality”), which others are meaningless gobbledygook in which a few carefully chosen code words poll well, but the public is not at all enthusiastic about Democrat policies in that regard (“infrastructure,” “pay equity,” arguably what he actually means by “early childhood education”) and then you’ve got gun control, subject of the most epic ass-kicking the Democrat Party has taken in recent memory.

The latter topic is the one I keep coming back to, as a lesson for the GOP Establishment in how they should have handled the ObamaCare defunding / shutdown drama.  As you can see from Biden’s remarks, Democrats are not interested in portraying their failed political gambits as horrible mistakes they deserve to be punished by voters for making.  They don’t concede an inch of ground on their issues.  If they get hammered in the next couple of elections over ObamaCare, they won’t retreat into a defensive crouch and sob curses at the extremists who led them to destruction.  They’ll pat themselves on the back for trying to do the right thing, make sure everyone in the press pays due respect to their boundless good intentions, and get right back to their agenda.  

As ObamaCare collapses, they’re already talking about the single-payer nightmare they really wanted to inflict on the American people.  If ObamaCare is repealed before its carefully-designed intentional failure pushes America down the single-payer pit, Democrats won’t admit they were wrong, or acted contrary to the will of the people; they’ll just hatch the next decade-long scheme to take over health care, or some other portion of the economy.  

Notice Biden didn’t say a word about the four years of polling that show a fat majority of the American people hate ObamaCare.  When Democrats are obliged to discuss those polls, their talking points invariably insist that the people will come around to liking the Affordable Care Act eventually; in other words, the Dems are willing to defend the idea of using pure coercive force to drag the people into something they hate, but which the Party “knows” is good for them.  I don’t want Republicans to embrace that variety of “leadership,” but they should at least take a sip of the tonic Joe Biden guzzles on a daily basis, and embrace the idea of bringing the people around to support the right policies, instead of trying to find some magical policy mix that will melt the media’s heart and eke out a few victories at the polls.  If nothing else, Republicans need to start hoarding political capital, as Biden is doing here, rather than setting it on fire as a peace offering every time the Beltway media frowns at them.