By Glenn Reynolds | Instanpundit
You can’t really blame Biden. He just reads — and signs —
whatever they put in front of him.
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RELATED
ARTICLE
President Biden demonstrated his and his
party's dependence upon the coronavirus pandemic for the achievement of office
and their conduct in office.
By Conrad Black
President Joe Biden's first address to the nation was at least coherent,
as he spoke directly to the teleprompter and his diction was comprehensible.
But it was repetitive and ungracious and lugubrious. He was incapable of
giving the slightest credit to his predecessor, although President Donald Trump is
almost solely responsible for advancing the vaccine timetable more than anyone could
have hoped for. Trump was roundly condemned by the Democratic media last
May for predicting a virus before year-end, but it was in fact distributed
starting on December 11, and on Inauguration Day, one million vaccinations were
effected in the United States for the first time.
President Biden speaks frequently and presumably with
sincerity about his goal of national unity. His comparative invisibility,
somnolent manner, and reluctance to interact even with the docile national
political media (which conducted his campaign for him last year), assure a
cooler temperature and calmer political atmosphere than was possible in the
pyrotechnics and abrasions of the Trump era. This phenomenon is reflected in
the heavy declines in viewership of the news channels-over 40 percent on CNN,
similar drops on MSNBC, and rather less than that on Fox News. Trump was the
great newsmaker, both for those who loved and those who hated him, and the few
people in between, and his departure, as it was intended to do by those who
voted against him, has made the U.S. a more serene country politically.
But since nearly 48 percent of American voters supported
President Trump, national unity will not now be advanced by implicitly
denigrating him and failing to give him any credit where any informed person
recognizes he deserves some. National unity will not be achieved by
defining it as the near-half of the electorate that voted for the ex-president
renouncing their expressed political preferences and embracing what they voted
against four months ago.
President Biden also demonstrated his and his party's
dependence upon the coronavirus
pandemic for the achievement of office and their conduct in office.
For someone unfamiliar with the statistical facts, his remarks on Thursday
night could have been taken as the struggle of America to liberate itself from
an almost universal plague that had throttled the nation, vastly increased
mortality rates among the whole population, and threatened the lives of every
American. Everyone was to listen to Dr. Tony Fauci, who has more often been
proved incorrect than accurate in his wishes and predictions and has
faced in all four directions on almost every issue associated with the
pandemic, except for his unceasing advocacy of shutdowns, which have proved
a disaster that probably did more harm than good to the mental and physical
health of the population of the United States, as in other countries. If
everyone masks up, continues to behave like a species of frightened moles,
then said Mr. Biden, perhaps small gatherings at home on July 4 may be
possible.
Doubtless, the gas-lit, Democratic echo-chamber of the
national political media will hail this as the greatest address of its kind
since Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chat on the banking system in March
1933. But I suspect that the polls will reveal that the public was unimpressed
by the president’s dreary recitation of the dark and hopeless night that he
pretends to be lifting. Most Americans know by now that 99.997 percent
of healthy Americans below the age of 65 survive Covid-19 if contracted. There
is also the fact that 94.6 percent of healthy Americans above the age of 65
survive it and that 80 percent of those who do not survive it sadly have other
ailments. We should also note it is rarely clear which is the
effective cause of death, that it has only slightly moved the rate of
fatalities in the country, that the average age of coronavirus death is the
same as the national life expectancy (78), and that there is no excuse or
need for wearing masks out-of-doors or for keeping schools closed.
Nor is the president’s appearance reassuring. He has a
sickly pallor, is underweight, and quavers at times. Everyone will wish him
good health and long life, but his appearance and manner on Thursday night will
not incite confidence that he is likely to enjoy them. President Biden is
oddly dyspeptic and downcast for someone who used to proclaim his ability and
temptation to beat his chief opponent (Trump, who looks like Tarzan in
comparison), to a pulp. Given that the country is approaching 100 million
vaccinations and the incidence of death and of hospitalization for the virus is
sharply declining and herd immunity approaches apace with a complete
vaccination program, he should have been much more optimistic and upbeat,
captured the spirit of springtime, disarmed the scores of millions of Trump
supporters with a kind word on the subject which the whole nation can agree
with: thanksgiving at the decline of the coronavirus and the approach of the
end of the crisis.
I do not agree with those who are overly critical of his
naming his one major legislative accomplishment the Covid relief bill, even though 90 percent of it was just
good old-fashioned pump-priming and log-rolling, backscratching of failed Obama
programs and misgoverned blue states. From 1942 on, FDR called almost every
bill on every subject a measure to assist veterans of the armed forces. But
setting off around the country with the vice president “and the first lady and
first gentleman” to tout the munificence of this bill, while blissfully
ignoring the monstrous crisis on the southern border for which this president
is exclusively responsible and whose existence he denies, is unlikely to
impress the American public any more than, I suspect, the country appreciated
his wan bloviations of Thursday night.
Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper
publisher whose most recent book is Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is
Chairman Emeritus of the National Interest.
