This is off the charts for Joe Biden
On Wednesday night, President Biden finally delivered a joint address to Congress – waiting until his first 100 days in office until the worst part of the COVID pandemic was under control. For a time, Republicans tried to play this up as a scandal – claiming the speech was delayed because the president wasn’t physically able to give it, that he missed the cutoff to legally give it, or some other outlandish reason, but all they did was draw more attention to when the speech would finally be given.
Now it’s officially over – President Biden hit it out of the park and his speech earned an 85% approval rating, with 78% of people who heard it saying they now feel more optimistic about the direction America is going in – while another poll by CNN said that 58% of voters felt the president did the appropriate amount of outreach to Republican voters. We already knew that an overwhelming majority of voters supported Biden’s proposals before the speech happened, so that’s the real number that GOP leaders ought to be worried about. It means that Republicans are going to have a hard sell in claiming that Democrats refuse to work with them – with more and more people seeing through the gaslighting.
What’s notable about the speech is that President Biden wasn’t afraid to go there – he all but declared the age of trickle-down economics over – the scam that Republicans have been desperately peddling for almost a century and what so many voters once accepted as fact. No wonder so many of them are enraged – the speech was given just as the economy is thriving, child poverty is dropping, and their worldview is being shown for the callous and hollow nonsense it always was.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making