From the Journal op ed columnist Bill McGurn.
"The president’s real messaging failure is that Donald Trump had a better message."
You knew it was coming. Ever since election night, Democrats from Nancy Pelosi on down have been blaming Joe Biden for costing them the White House. Last weekend Team Biden hit back. On Sunday the Washington Post reported that the president still believes “he could have defeated Trump.”
Which raises the question: Were Democrats and the press more dishonest before the election, when they routinely reassured the American people Mr. Biden was sharp as a tack? Or are they now, after the election, when they insist Mr. Biden’s decision to run for re-election—which most supported at the time—doomed Democratic chances for holding the White House?
Missing from the back and forth about Mr. Biden’s decision to run is the slightest recognition that his policies were the source of public dissatisfaction with him. … They created problems like inflation. And they damaged the Democratic Party’s credibility when its leaders tried to tell the American people that if only they were smart enough, they would appreciate how good they had it.
As if to underscore the point, when Kamala Harris ran on the exact same agenda, the policies proved just as unpopular.
Public disenchantment with the president began when he insisted the humiliating pullout from Afghanistan was “an extraordinary success.”…
The dishonesty continued when his homeland security secretary insisted “the border is secure.”…
Probably the most infamous example of Democratic deception concerned inflation. First there was denial. Then the American people were told it was transitory. Then they were told it was licked. “Bidenomics is working” wasn’t a winning appeal to workers who saw that their paychecks weren’t going as far.
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Now it is all unraveling, and everyone’s dumping on Mr. Biden for not getting out sooner. Mr. Biden doesn’t see it that way, of course. He insists that the party’s mistake was ousting the only man who had ever beaten Mr. Trump.
But Democrats aren’t mad at Mr. Biden for staying in the race. They’re mad because he exposed how all those now turning on him, Mrs. Pelosi included, reassured Americans that the president was at the top of his game when they knew otherwise.
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If Mr. Biden’s policies were working, the American people might have given him the benefit of the doubt and maybe even elected Ms. Harris. But they didn’t. And rather than reconsider the policies, Democrats complain that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had a poor messaging strategy, that Mr. Trump was far better at taking advantage of new media—e.g., his interview with podcaster Joe Rogan—to get his message across.
Which misses the obvious: Mr. Trump won because he had a better message—because of better policies that yielded better results when he was president.
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