Horse Race Reporting: Comin’ round the bend…

Our Failed Political Press ™ has already decided that President Handsome Joe Biden is a failed president and his doom is neigh, er, nigh.

But history is not on Biden’s side. In fact, voters may have already made up their minds.

That, at least, is the argument from DOUG SOSNIK in his latest memothat we are happy to share first with the Playbook audience. You can read the full memo here

So why even bother to vote, Democrats, you are going to lose anyway!

Doug looks at the Biden presidency so far and concludes that the midterms were essentially lost during the period from July to November last year. Nothing since then has changed Biden’s standing. And Doug thinks there’s only one thingthat possibly could: “reframing the terms of debate for the midterm elections around the pending decision by the Supreme Court on Roe.”

Tell us how it all went wrong, you know, according to Politico:

A look back at how it fell apart for Biden:

— January to June: The Honeymoon. It seemed like a competent new president was taming the pandemic and bringing back a robust economy. “[M]ore than half the country approved of his performance as president,” Sosnik writes. “His levels of support during that period were much higher than Trump ever attained in his four years in office.”

— July: The Independence Day Illusion. Sosnik sees July Fourth as a key moment in the public’s turn against Biden. “The seeds of this downward trend were planted when the Biden Administration hosted a July 4th event on the south lawn of the White House, creating the false impression that the Covid-19 battle had been won,” he writes. “Although the president warned that the pandemic was not yet over, the message that broke through was the president’s claim that [America] was ‘closer than ever to declaring our independence’ from the deadly virus.”

But here’s the REAL problem: the Press knifed him:

— August: The Afghanistan Debacle. In Sosnik’s analysis, this had two major effects: (1) Biden’s reputation for competence was severely damaged, and (2) his honeymoon with the press ended.

And Our Failed Political Press ™ never mentioned it was the largest and most successful airlift in history. They completely manufactured this so-called debacle and never corrected themselves.

We then move into the treachery of Republicans, the Blue Dogs in the House (who separated the Infrastructure bill and BBB, thus ensuring its doom) and Republican-adjacent Senators Manchin and Sinema. We don’t know what this is a failure of Biden, but, you know, it is:

— September to November: Inflation, Virginia and the death of BBB. By the fall, things started to spiral out of control for Biden, when the real-world negative economic consequences of inflation started to be felt by voters at the same time that Biden was rejected by both voters in Virginia and members of his own party in the Senate.

And the cumulative failures of the press now reaches their exciting, pre-determined conclusion:

“The cumulative impact of these events transformed the increasing optimism in the country last summer into a profound sense of pessimism by November,” Sosnik writes. “For the past six months, over 70% of the public thinks that the country is headed in the wrong direction. This sense of pessimism in the country has dragged Biden’s job approval down to 39%.”

Here it comes: “At away games at stadiums facing south, left handed batters have never scored a triple on the second inning after dark on holiday weekends,” or some such nonsense:

SOSNIK’S WARNING: The window for Biden to reverse this damage is about to close.

“In the last four midterm elections, by June the public had made up its mind about the leadership in Washington and how they were going to vote in November,” he writes. “According to Gallup, Trump’s 39% job approval in early February 2018, [BARACK] OBAMA’s 41% approval in June 2014 and 45% approval in June 2010, and [GEORGE W.] BUSH’s 38% approval in March 2006 all matched their job approval on Election Day.”

Each of those presidents “suffered significant defeats and lost control of at least one branch of Congress.”

I hate sounding like a Republican from the ’80s, but damn, our reactionary right press was out to get the Democrats, and they are now taking a bow.

And here’s their conclusion, which weirdly is probably right about reframing the debate around the GOP’s roll-back of Constitutional rights:

“That is why the stakes are so high as we enter this final period critical for the Democrats to seize the pending Court decision on Roe vs Wade as a way to alter the trajectory of the election,” Sosnik concludes. “If they are not successful in reframing the terms of debate for the midterm elections around the pending decision by the Supreme Court on Roe, we will look back at Biden and the Democrats’ failures last summer and early fall as the reasons for their electoral defeats this November.”

So you get that? The alleged liberal press manufactured a controversy, nourished it, and now they are warning Democrats that they are doomed unless everyone takes their advice, which frankly we should. We always have to fix the Republicans treachery. Always.