Joe Biden just nailed it
I would imagine that most people don’t remember the name Velma Hart. In 2010, Velma Hart, a participant in a CNBC town hall forum with then President Barack Obama, confronted Obama with the unsparing message that she was tired of making excuses for him. “Quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the man for change I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now.” It was an exchange that was rebroadcast many times after it originally aired and discussed at great length. In no way was it a positive experience for Barack Obama.
Going back to 2008 when he took office, Obama, in his virtuous, gentlemanly way, had stated repeatedly from his first day in office “it’s my economy now.” He never made any attempt to lay it at the feet of George W. Bush where it belonged.
After Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech of 1979 (in which the word “malaise” was never actually used), it pretty much became the law among political advisers that a president should never level with the people of this country if it meant giving them a tough prognosis. Whatever the situation, regardless of how dire it might be, optimism would be the only prescribed messaging.
I’ve always believed that President Obama did himself an unfortunate disservice when he made the decision not to fully impress on the American people that we were in the toughest of situations back in 2008, that getting out of it wasn’t going to be easy, and that it certainly wasn’t going to be quick. But the calculation was made that the country couldn’t take that kind of stark assessment.
As is so often the case with Republicans, George Bush and Dick Cheney simply walked away from the crash site, secure in Americans’ short memories and secure in the fact that the innate sense of decency and responsibility common to most Democrats and certainly to Barack Obama would guide his approach to the problem. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened.
Americans thought surely now that we had a new president and a new administration that the economy would be fully restored and up and running again in short order. But, of course, it was not. Statistically, it was constantly improving, but the practical damage to people’s lives had simply been far too great.
And, true to form, in no time at all, Republicans had their marching orders and were in front of every available camera repeating the words “we just can’t take four more years of this horrible Obama economy.”
And then came the 2010 midterms.
This afternoon Joe Biden did a very smart thing: he was honest about our situation with the virus. He was perfectly straightforward, dispensing realism and not sunbeams. But it was all tempered with a focused, low-key, under-control, engine-room feel. It may be a hokey comparison, but it conveyed the sensibility of an experienced airline pilot who makes the decision not to withhold troubling information from his passengers but to instead tell them that there is in fact a problem but that it’s being dealt with, that he has every confidence that he’s going to bring the plane in safely, but in the meantime he’d appreciate your help and cooperation and just a bit of patience.
And in speaking the way he did today, he may have taken a significant step toward avoiding our next big foreseeable national crisis, namely lessening the possibility of turning over control in the 2022 midterms to the very architects of our undoing.
