“I don’t care that he’s 80, because the choice is between him and Donald Trump,” says Sam Jean, who returns to weigh in on President Joe Biden as Biden prepares to run for re-election in 2024. The greatest criticism leveled at the president, from his own party as well as his Republican detractors, is that he is too old for the job. Sam argues that people’s perception of Biden is based on the media taking clips out of context. Michael recounts attending a rally where Biden appeared spry and in command of a fervent audience, dispelling popular beliefs that he is both unreliable and unrelatable.
People also want to blame the president for economic issues that are out of his control, such as high inflation rates and increasing costs of living, while ignoring that unemployment is the lowest it’s ever been. Democrats have a messaging problem, suggests Sam. Their rational approach and insistence on facts means that they don’t experience the immediate, emotional reaction that Republicans are able to elicit from the MAGA crowd.
Stay until the end for Michael’s closing thoughts, where he explains why Biden, though older than Trump only by a few years, is handling aging much more gracefully.
Quotes:
“I don’t think his age has anything to do with his ability to connect with people, because when I see him, I see him as somebody’s grandfather.” (9:49 | Sam)
“Trump is just a crazy, stupid person, and they have a lot of energy. He’s always raging about something and so it looks like he’s a young guy, but he’s not young himself.” (11:42 | Sam)
“All these things that people have direct anger about —or I would say misdirected anger about —is to Biden. They are not realizing that there are other factors involved, particularly in Congress, because I’ve not yet heard a possible alternative solution to inflation.” (17:48 | Michael)
“There is this famous composer who is told about this young prodigy who’s great and so the composer goes to listen to this prodigy. And this prodigy has a concert and plays his piece flawlessly, and people come up to the composer afterwards and ask, ‘Hey, what did you think?’ He said, ‘He could play the music but he doesn’t feel the notes.’ And that’s what Democrats are missing sometimes. They don’t feel the notes. Not from the economic arguments. They can play the music, they can tell people, ‘Well, this is not really the president’s fault, look at these numbers, look at these numbers, look at these numbers. But that’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear ‘You feel the soul of this thing that’s bothering me. How are these things going to go down?’ And I don’t know that they have effectively messaged that, and I don’t know if you can, to be honest with you. I don’t know if you can effectively message that, because if people feel like things are bad, how do you stop that feeling?” (19:40 | Sam)
“People who are liberals tend to be less influenced in the way that Conservatives can be influenced. We look for evidence for things…But the MAGA crowd has been inoculated to just believe what they are told.” (24:18 | Sam)
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