DEMOCRATS IN THE BUNKER
“…Joe Biden is, according to voters, just “not paying enough attention to [the] most important issues.”
What issues? Inflation, obviously, which is the single most important issue on all voters’ minds, regardless of party affiliation. Crime is another, as is immigration. Both issues matter more to voters today than they did a month ago. If there’s a common banner under which these seemingly disparate issues can be filed, it is a general sense of precarity. Voters who don’t feel safe in their homes or on their streets, who are concerned about the capacity limits of America’s social services, and who don’t know what the money in their bank accounts is going to be worth tomorrow will prioritize those concerns over just about everything else. Only 31 percent believe the president and his party are focused on those “bread-and-butter concerns.” They’re right. But that’s just what the voters that the White House is courting want.
There is a popular Twitter account that goes by the handle “Mueller, She Wrote.” The account is managed by a former employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Allison Gill; and she was fired for it. An internal audit of her conduct at the VA turned up some discomfiting questions “about how she could record a podcast and perform live shows while claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder,” as Politico reported. But creating speculative “Resistance” fiction has proven a lucrative alternative to government work. It’s clearly much more personally rewarding, too.
“If you’re wondering why Twitter is so quiet today,” Gill wrote, it’s because so many of the people who constituted “Resistance Twitter” during Donald Trump’s presidency spent the day at the White House. Given how politically engaged these people are, it’s a safe bet that their agenda at the White House today was dominated by politics. For some participants, it’s the first time they’ve been in the president’s proximity since September, when the White House inexplicably threw a party for itself to celebrate what a great job Democrats had done to contain inflation. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson.
It’s tempting to question the competence of a political operation that would so indulge an unrepresentative sample of people who dominate an unrepresentative platform like Twitter. Are the president’s advisers cosseting Joe Biden in a cocoon of admirers? Is the administration settling into an information silo that filters out the many mounting signs of imminent disaster on the horizon? Maybe. But there appears to be an insatiable appetite among the president’s supporters for news and information that distracts, if only for a moment, from the pervasive sense of impending doom…”