Quit Underestimating President Biden

November 30, 2022

If Republicans are going to successfully work through the next two years in
Congress – and win the presidency in 2024 – we need to look much more
deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022.

by Newt Gingrich

Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Joe Biden.

The college and professional football seasons always help me clarify the difference
between winning and losing. I love the Green Bay Packers, but they are not having a
good year. On the other hand, the University of Georgia just executed its second
undefeated regular season since Herschel Walker played there. (Of course, the
Bulldogs must beat LSU for the SEC Championship and then win their second
consecutive national championship to Georgia alumni’s expectations.)

The clarity of winning and losing creates a clarity of analysis about who is doing well
and who isn’t.

If you apply that simple model to Biden, you realize how well he is doing by his own
definition of success.

Like most Americans, I do not approve of the job he is doing. Like virtually all
conservatives and Republicans, I deeply oppose his policies. They are clearly
weakening America and strengthening our enemies. And, again, like most Americans,
I oppose the woke policies which are undermining and threatening to destroy
popular, unique, shared American culture.

However, conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to

blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms. He has only built upon
and fortified the left-wing Big Government Socialist woke culture system.

We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes

strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to
him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats.

But remember: Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan both preferred to
be underestimated. Both wanted people to think of them as pleasant – but not
dangerous. They found being underestimated was a major asset. While people
laughed at them, they were busy achieving their goals and getting their programs
implemented.

Biden has achieved something similar.

He has spent 50 years in public life (elected to the U.S. Senate at 29 and only eligible
to be sworn in after the election in 1972). Biden genially bumbled into becoming a
major force in the Senate. While he failed miserably in attempting to run for
president, he ended up as vice president for eight years. Then he stayed in the
basement and won in 2020.

The Biden team took an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the U.S. House and a
50-50 tie in the Senate and turned it into trillions of dollars in spending – and a
series of radical bills. The latest bill on sexual rights overriding all other rights was
bitterly opposed by virtually every conservative even as it passed with Republican
support.

Biden has carefully and cautiously waged war in Ukraine with no American troops.
Although poorly timed and slowly delivered, U.S. weapons and financial aid have
helped cripple what most thought would be an easy victory for Russian President
Vladimir Putin.

Despite terrible problems with the economy, crime, and the border (which led many
analysts, me included, to assume the GOP would make big gains in November) Biden
and his team executed a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump
supporters. They turned Jan. 6 into a crisis which eclipsed the Left’s previous summer
of fire, chaos, and destruction. They also grossly exaggerated the threat to abortion
rights. And it all worked.

The Biden team had one of the best first term off-year elections in history. They were
not repudiated. They did not have to pay for their terrible mismanagement of the
economy.

If Republicans are going to successfully work through the next two years in the
Congress – and win the presidency in 2024 – we need to look much more deeply at
what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022.
Today there is not nearly enough understanding (or acknowledgement) among
leading Republicans that our system and approach failed. We need to rethink from
the ground up how we are going to Defeat Big Government Socialism – including
almost inevitable second-time Democrat Presidential Nominee Biden.

This is a much bigger challenge than I would have guessed before the election.