Joe Biden’s Katrina Moment

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Here’s a history lesson for you. My daughter was born in August of 2005. At the hospital, they joked we should name her Katrina. Why? Because outside, the storm was raging.

I am from Louisiana, and Katrina was a disaster, the scars of which you can still see almost 20 years later. Katrina was awful. My wife worked with a lady whose family refused to move. They knew the storm was coming. They lived in Southern Mississippi, but they lived several miles inland from the coast. They thought they would be fine. They found the whole family in a live oak tree. They were all alive, thank God, clinging for their lives. I'm not making that story up. The whole family, the storm surge came in, washed the house away, and they clung to each other in a live oak. It was that bad. Bridges and roads and whole towns were washed away by the storm surge of Katrina.

The hurricane was awful, and it happened while George W. Bush was president. He had gotten into his second term and won with 51% of the vote against John Kerry. Democrats had pedaled conspiracy theories all through November that electronic voting machines in Ohio were rigged. They claimed Ken Blackwell, then the secretary of state, somehow or another was able to fraudulently rig the system to ensure George W. Bush's reelection. The Democrats went nuts over Bush's reelection and the media went nuts with them to a degree.

When Katrina rolled through, the media and the Democrats together pushed a narrative against George W. Bush that he was so focused on the war that he was incompetent when it came to the domestic front. Katrina became the albatross around his neck. To their credit, Bush had several missteps. FEMA did a terrible job in the initial stages after Katrina. The storm was far more dangerous than expected. They knew it was going to be a bad storm. It was far worse than they even projected and FEMA did a terrible job. The Southern Baptist Mission Board was the first organization on the ground. They even beat Walmart, and Walmart came in before the federal government.

Do you know the Waffle House rule? You can tell how bad a storm situation is by whether or not a Waffle House is open, on a limited menu, or closed. There were Waffle Houses that no longer existed. Clean slates, just the concrete slab, where they had been. That's how bad Katrina was.

FEMA screwed things up, and it was hung around George Bush's neck by the Democrats. He had flown Air Force One over the New Orleans area. They tipped the wings and turned so he could look out the window. He did not want to land in New Orleans because he did not want to distract from the recovery efforts. The airport was not in good condition to begin with, and he didn't want them to distract them from clean-up efforts.

The Democrats said, "Look, he doesn't even care. He just flew over and looked. He didn't even land." It hung around George Bush's neck. There was no way for him to win on that. Had he landed and they redirected resources to clean up the airport, they would've attacked him as well. But it sunk in that George Bush was so focused on a war overseas, he had lost his focus on people at home. He didn't care. The guy who seemed to care, the guy who hugged people, the guy who was crying with everybody all the time, he just no longer cared. He wasn't competent to handle this stuff, and it stuck. His polling never recovered. There were other things as well, but it was Katrina.

Joe Biden has had his Katrina moment, and I don't know that he will ever recover. The Democrats should have been mindful of this. He should have been mindful of this. Joe Biden was one of the people who capitalized on George W. Bush after Katrina. He should have known, to quote Jeremiah Wright, "the chickens have come home roost" for Joe Biden. Joe Biden's polling collapsed and went negative in Afghanistan. You don't have to know all of the details of Afghanistan to know that the American public went from looking at Joe Biden as the man who cared and was not Donald Trump to believing him to be an incompetent biblical donkey who might have dementia.

There is a growing number of Americans who think there might be something wrong with Joe Biden. This is something the media doesn't talk about and only a few pollsters will poll on it, but there's a growing body of evidence that suggest Americans aren't sure Joe Biden is all there. Maybe he's out to lunch, maybe not. More people think he is than used to, but also overwhelmingly, people don't think he's competent. They think he's incompetent, and they don't like him very much anymore. They don't think that he's the guy. He campaigned as caring and compassionate. He had a tragic life story, with his first wife and his child being killed, and the man knew how to relate to other people. He made it all about reliability.

Remember the Muslim father of a soldier who spoke at the Democratic convention? He was not actually as partisan as people claimed, but Donald Trump went after him for his criticisms. Democrats had him at the Democratic convention, and his point was that Joe Biden cared about his son. But Joe Biden didn't care about your sons and daughters in Afghanistan. Those 13 soldiers got killed. The Taliban stormed in way quicker than they should have. We allowed them to come in and we left Americans behind. Americans don't leave Americans behind, but Joe Biden did. You don't really recover from that.

Now we're in a situation where inflation has surged to the highest rate since 1982, but it's not just that. The consumer price index is up and industrial inflation is actually at a record high. It's not just consumer prices. Inflation is off the chain.

The administration is incapable of battling back the virus. Joe Biden said he would beat the virus, that he was more competent than Donald Trump. He could beat the virus, not just contain. He said he would beat the virus and now this morning, Joe Biden's urging Americans to mask up yet again. They told us to "get vaxxed, get boosted, live your life," and now they're saying, "wear an N95 mask, and we're going to make it freely available, and by God, you better wear it." They can't beat it.

They can't get voting rights passed in the Senate. Kyrsten Sinema is speaking on the floor of the United States Senate saying there is no way in hell she's changing the filibuster that kills the voting rights measure. Joe Biden poured all of his political capital into a cause he lost before he began. It makes him not look competent. Also, he poured all of his energy into a voting rights measure that was lost before it began, and he didn't do anything like that with COVID, and he can't get it done. And in the process, he dared to divide Americans, calling people who disagree with him "a racist."

Biden’s approval rating is at 33%. Let me give you a clear perspective here. The lowest Donald Trump ever went in the Quinnipiac Poll was 37%, so Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump ever was. He's more unpopular by seven points than Gerald Ford was after he pardoned Richard Nixon. A president with only a third of the support of the American public wants the Democrats in the United States Senate, who hold 50 of 100 seats, to break the rules of the Senate to unilaterally change them and get rid of the filibuster by breaking rules of the Senate that require a two-thirds vote to actually change the rules. He wants them to change the rules with only 50 votes, plus the tiebreaking vote from the vice president, in order to pass a law to keep Democrats in power. And yet says, "It's the Republicans who are the threat to democracy."

Joe Biden had his Katrina moment in Afghanistan and his administration was too clueless to realize they needed to undo the damage. He dug his heels in on Afghanistan when all of his advisors told him not to and we're still feeling the repercussions. Joe Biden not only lost Afghanistan to the Taliban, he's on the verge of losing his power to the Republicans because it turns out the public's right. He doesn't care, and he's not competent, and he might just have dementia, and nothing his administration has done since Afghanistan has done anything to change people of that perception.

But that perception has become the presupposition in every news headline involving Joe Biden that the public encounters and they're not likely to change it anytime soon. The result is doom and gloom for the Democrats heading into November. In Washington they’re openly talking about how the Republicans might just take back the Senate too, something that even four months ago was a hypothetical and now looks more like reality. It all comes down to Biden and how everything he's done on every single issue since Afghanistan has struck the American public as uncaring, not compassionate, and not competent. Now, all the White House can do is what Democrats always do, scream "racism."