Was this a Biden commercial? Or just an Axios.com commercial touting Biden?
At the end of Monday's Way Too Early, MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire introduced their regular feature on Axios.com's "1 Big Thing." Axios co-founder Mike Allen (a former New York Times and Washington Post reporter) sounded like a Biden advertisement, gushing over "Biden's Success Story" on the economy and going so far as to compare him to Ronald Reagan at this point in their presidencies, even though Biden looks more like Jimmy Carter.
Allen touted "Biden's winning streak" on legislation, a "rewiring of the economy."
ALLEN: So we just saw the new investments in chip-making in the U.S. Early, big investments in the U.S. capacity to make vaccines, get ready for the next threat. Of course, the infrastructure bill. And the interesting twist to this, Jonathan, is that there is an America-First populist streak to this.That is more oil drilling, here! Making more vaccines, here! With a possible victory coming up, more clean energy, here! And possibly the biggest in history.
Now, asterisk to this, is so far, President Biden doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of credit for this. He hasn't explained it as well as he could. But when you add it up, it is a remarkable record.
Biden hasn't explained his "success story," so he needs liberal journalists to do it for him.
If this boosterism wasn't gross enough, then came the comparisons to Ronald Reagan. Lemire called it an "unlikely" comparison. That's putting it mildly. But Allen went to work (for the White House "confidant," maybe chief of staff Ron Klain):
ALLEN: The headline on Axios, "We are Reagan." That's what a Biden confidant told me. And here's what they have in mind. You and I could say Biden had a series of breaks after not being able to catch a break for a year. Baby formula winding up on his desk. The Biden view is that he is, this is a payoff, a vindication, for playing the long game. So when that confidant said "We are Reagan," their extension of that was, we had a big plan, and it's getting in place. And what they say is that President Biden, sticking to his bottom-up, middle-out strategy for the economy, rather than top down, has paid off. That they've stuck to that across all of their big issues.
It's more like a bottomed-out economy, dragging down everyone and their retirement accounts. But then it got really goopy:
ALLEN: And Jonathan, they point us to a poll, in The Washington Post, August 1982, 40 years ago this month for the seasoned viewers out there, Barry Sussman byline, one of the classics. And this was a poll with 58 percent of people in August 1982, saying that first-term president Ronald Reagan shouldn't run again. And of course, as resonance to this, we've had a parade of polls, people saying President Biden shouldn't run again. Most notably, there's a new USA Today-Suffolk poll saying two- thirds of voters don't think President Biden or former President Trump should run again. They don't want the rematch. And the punchline to this, less than two years after that poll, in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states, the most electoral [college] votes of any candidate in history.
Allen offered the "asterisk" that while "the president's inner circle may think of him as Reagan," there's "great skepticism among voters."
This MSNBC segment comparing Biden to Reagan was brought to you in part by T-Mobile.
