Liz Peek: Biden's early blunders – here's how he could hurt Democrats in 2022

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Under cover of the impeachment circus, Joe Biden has been very busy, frantically extinguishing every last vestige of the Trump presidency.

What took four years to build, Biden will destroy in four weeks.  

In his haste, he has made some grievous mistakes. Mistakes that will hurt the country and weaken Democrats’ prospects in 2022 and beyond.   

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Topping the list of blunders, Biden has: 

1.Overturned Trump immigration policies that stemmed the flow of caravans from Central America flooding our southern border. Biden is set to welcome 25,000 asylum-seekers, who had been in Mexico, into our nation. Soon we will witness chaos at the border, as we did under President Obama. Americans agree that our border must be secure; this will hurt Biden, just as it hurt Obama. 

2.Canceled the Keystone Pipeline, nixing thousands of high-paying union jobs, even though the pipeline was shown by the Obama administration to have minimal environmental impact. Plus, Biden has "paused" new drilling leases on federal lands, which will especially kill revenues for New Mexico, which voted for Biden in November. Biden’s attack on energy will eventually cause oil output to drop and gasoline prices to rise at the pump, hurting low-income Americans.  

3.Sided with teachers unions over the needs of families, and especially women, trying to earn a living. Biden’s refusal to order teachers back on the job and indifference to the "science" saying that schools can open safely is payback for union support, but a slap at unemployed workers forced to stay home and care for their kids. 

4.Begun to actively undermine the Trump administration’s extraordinary progress in the Middle East. Unimaginably, Biden has already jeopardized the Abraham Accords by temporarily freezing arms sales to the UAE which were included in that deal. Also, Biden has yet to speak with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, pathetically returning to Obama’s failed policies in the region. Even Biden-sycophant CNN is questioning the delay.  

5.Encouraged Democrats to jam through an absurd $1.9 trillion aid package with no GOP votes, destroying his campaign promise to work across the aisle. He is pushing the budget-buster deal even though there remains one TRILLION dollars unspent from prior packages and our economy is rebounding. Buying votes and bailing out blue states with $350 billion of taxpayer funds will not play well in purple states like Georgia, and could prove dangerous to the economy. 

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Biden is racing to show progressives in his party that he deserved their vote, and that his party will again merit their support in 2022. Maybe some payback was needed, but Biden has overdone it. There was a reason that the Democrat Establishment scuttled the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., not once but twice. American remains a centrist country, and Biden’s progressive diktats will not prove popular. 

Americans are beginning to wake up. The initial relief that Trump is gone appears to be giving way to a Jimmy Carter-like malaise. That may explain the drop in consumer sentiment just reported by the University of Michigan, which caught the liberal media off guard. CNN reported, for instance, "Consumer sentiment takes a hit despite promises of more stimulus." 

Liberals cynically imagine that all Biden has to do is throw enough cash around, and Americans will ignore the tent cities springing up at the border or the fired oilfield workers applying for food stamps.   

Even CNN admitted that the consumer survey was "far worse than economists' had expected, falling to 76.2 points – a major slide from the same period last year, just before the pandemic hit, when the index stood at 101 points." It turns out that people earning less than $75,000 were especially downbeat and that Americans at all income levels soured on the outlook for the future.   

CNN concludes: "The report signals that the Biden administration's stimulus plans and the vaccine rollout aren't doing much so far to boost consumer confidence." 

Biden appears to think he won a broad mandate to be, as he promised, the "most progressive president in history."

It’s not just consumers who are in the dumps. The National Federation of Independent Businesses reported that, coincident with Biden’s election, small business optimism (which had been climbing) has collapsed. "The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index declined in January to 95.0, down 0.9 points from December and three points below the 47-year average of 98. Owners expecting better business conditions over the next six months declined seven points to a net negative 23%, the lowest level since November 2013. The net percent of owners expecting better business conditions has fallen 55 points over the past four months." 

When small companies, which employ nearly half of America’s workers, are not optimistic about the future, they delay hiring and spending. The NFIB survey signals trouble ahead. 

And what about Joe Biden’s popularity three weeks in? A recent Quinnipiac poll proclaimed, "Nearly 70% of Americans support President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan," but oddly, only 49% approve of the job Biden is doing. The Quinnipiac poll director remarked, "The Biden numbers are solid but not spectacular…"  Especially unspectacular given the poll’s sample, in which only 23% were registered Republicans, compared to the national weighting of 29%. 

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 It is early days yet. Biden’s hasty decision to reverse everything Trump is foolish. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump; it’s safe to say the majority supported him because they approved of his policies, many of which proved startlingly successful.  

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Biden appears to think he won a broad mandate to be, as he promised, the "most progressive president in history." He seems not to realize that, according to post-election polling, more Americans were happy that Trump lost than Biden won. More people, in other words, voted against Trump than for Biden.  

Now that the impeachment battle is over, Trump will no longer dominate the news, and the country will turn its attention to Biden. Voters will be shocked to see how far he has strayed from his promise to heal the nation. They will be shocked to see what a mess he has already made. 

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