“Things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago.”

Let that sentence sink in. That was Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, in what has to be the most surreal string of words ever uttered by a guy whose boss is polling at 38%.

WH Chief of Staff Ron Klain: “Things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago. […] We have problems to solve, but we’re solving them.” pic.twitter.com/zO3OslC5Fr

— The Hill (@thehill) November 14, 2021

Klain’s straight man was CNN’s increasingly malleable Jake Tapper, a once-proud lefty who too often bows to his network and his audience and just sort of sits there looking like a guy with a fishbone caught in his throat. On this day, though, Tapper pressed his guest about the mess he’d helped create: “So, how do you how do you fix this?” Tapper asked. “Obviously, I cover you guys every day. You do this every day. And you are talking about the economy. You are talking about coronavirus, but there’s obviously some sort of disconnect here.”

And in fairness to Klain, he qualified the remark above by limiting it to COVID and the economy. Still, who thinks his statement rings true even when it’s so narrowly tailored?

Not us, certainly, nor Oliver North or David Goetsch, who today revisited the question posed by Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter during their lone debate of the 1980 presidential campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Tightening the Gipper’s timeframe from four years to 10 months, they write:

Biden promised to improve our economy despite the fact it was already functioning at record levels when he came to office. Instead, his socialist programs, “Green New Deal” attacks on traditional energy, and paying Americans to stay home rather than work have created shortages of workers, essential goods, a supply chain debacle, and massive inflation driving many small businesses to close.

Biden swore to “fix immigration problems” on our southern border — an issue largely solved by policies of the previous administration and a wall. Instead, Biden has all but eliminated our southern border and created an unmitigated humanitarian and domestic fiscal disaster. The Biden “team” is now prepared to pay illegal “border crossers” hundreds of thousands in U.S. taxpayers’ dollars as “restitution” for entering our country illegally.

North and Goetsch also addressed Biden’s permanent pandemic, his liberty-sapping vaccine mandates, his Afghanistan debacle, and his racial demagoguery.

Indeed, Joe Biden has wrecked near about everything he’s touched. Take the supply chain, for example, which economists agree is the darkest cloud hanging over the American economy, and which seems to be anything but short-lived.

“The throng of container ships anchored off the coast of Southern California grew by 43% since President Biden’s announcement a month ago that the ports there would start working around the clock and ease supply chain woes,” reports journalist Joseph Clark. “A record 83 cargo ships sat off the coast Friday awaiting offload at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, according to data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That’s 25 more than the 58 container ships in the backup than when Mr. Biden made his announcement in mid-October.”

Meanwhile, as our Nate Jackson notes, inflation is running rampant, having hit a whopping 6.2% in October. That’s the steepest increase we’ve seen in more than three decades, and it taxes the least fortunate among us most terribly.

But don’t worry. Joe Biden says he’ll fix it. Honest, he will.