The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel

Author:Kimberley Strassel [STRASSEL, KIMBERLEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Rewriting history

It was about midway through 2021—Biden’s first year in office—that elected Democrats began to worry they had liability for the rise in crime. The issue hadn’t played in the 2020 presidential election as much as Republicans might have hoped. But the GOP continued to elevate the startling statistics, and the party’s nominee for the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, Glenn Youngkin, was capturing suburban voters’ attention by painting his Democratic opponent as soft on crime. “Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022,” warned an NPR story in July 2021.

Democrats’ first response was to engage in some flagrant revisionist history. Biden’s Covid “rescue” plan, passed in March 2021, had shoveled $350 million to states. The New York Times explained in a story after passage that this was a blank check to help states, counties, and municipalities with “pandemic-related costs, offsetting lost revenues.” The story mentioned some of the spending possibilities: “water, sewer and broadband” projects; retaining government workers; funding for mental-health services. Biden for his part didn’t even mention the $350 billion block in his initial statements about the new law, focusing instead on the direct checks it sent to households and its continued enhanced unemployment provisions.

By the summer of 2021, Democrats had a newly invented (a self-serving) reason for the state funds. Biden made a speech in which he called on states and local government to use some of their stash to fight crime. “President Biden said on Wednesday that states could draw from $350 billion in federal stimulus money to shore up police departments,” the New York Times reported in June. Weeks later, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Chris Taylor bragged in the NPR piece: “House Democrats delivered billions of dollars in the American Rescue Plan that local municipalities are using to fund both police and community-led violence intervention programs.”

By 2022, the left had morphed this into the claim that the $350 billion had been provided expressly to fight crime. The press happily reported this rewritten history. In a May ABC News story about a Biden meeting with mayors and police chiefs, the news outlet explained, “The Covid-19 relief law included $350 billion for state and local governments to reduce violence.” Biden’s 2022 State of the Union Address similarly left the impression his party had earmarked the $350 billion for law enforcement: “That’s why the American Rescue Plan provided $350 billion that cities, states and counties can use to hire more police and invest in proven strategies like community violence interruption,” he lyricized.

Biden was spooked enough by the crime liability that he made a point of using the national address to publicly rebuke the antipolice movement. “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.” And Democrats made a point to cheer and applaud wildly, the better to suggest they’d been propolice all along. The Democratic National Committee went so far

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