Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

January 20, 2022

Cool Hand Joe Resets His Messaging Strategy

The president thinks his problems are rooted in poor communication. He’s wrong.

Joe Biden isn’t Cool Hand Luke, but those around him seem to think his stunningly low job approval numbers are simply due to a failure to communicate.

They aren’t.

To be sure, Joe Biden has become an awful communicator. It wasn’t always that way, but it is now. Still, that’s not his problem. His problem is that after a year in office, the American people have come to see his policies as both idiotic and infuriating. These are the policies, after all, that resulted in a wide-open southern border, a disgraceful retreat and surrender in Afghanistan, a weak economy, a depleted workforce, a gummed-up supply chain, soaring inflation and spiraling gas and energy prices, oppressive vaccine mandates, rampant crime, a two-tiered justice system, heightened racial tensions, schools beholden to social justice and racial indoctrination, and a bitterly divided American people that he’d promised to unite.

He and his handlers just don’t seem to be getting the message, though. In fact, they’re planning to roll out a brand-new communications strategy. As the blindered optimists at NBC News report:

Biden’s reset plan, senior administration officials said, is to make his conversations with members of Congress less of a public priority and to emphasize spending more time communicating directly with Americans. The officials said that the White House will continue negotiations with Congress over Biden’s legislative priorities but that it would stop releasing details of the talks to the public.

Part of the goal is to shed the growing image that Biden is approaching the presidency like a member of the Senate, where he spent more than three decades. “He’s mindful that he doesn’t want to send the message that his role is to be legislator-in-chief,” another senior administration official said.

Oftentimes, a good comms strategy grows out of insights obtained from surveys and focus groups. But try as we might, we can’t imagine anyone outside the Beltway ever saying, “What Joe Biden most needs to do is stop approaching the presidency like a member of the Senate.”

Here’s an idea: Stop approaching the presidency like a woke leftist, and start approaching it like the centrist Democrat whom Barack Obama selected to balance out his ticket in 2008 and whom primary voters chose to stop Bernie Sanders in 2020. That Joe Biden and this Joe Biden are two entirely different creatures.

“What he have here is a failure to communicate,” said the frustrated Captain after thrashing Luke for his insolence. “Some men, you just can’t reach.” We think Joe Biden is one of those men — someone who just can’t be reached. Someone who just doesn’t seem to be getting the message that his policies are both idiotic and infuriating, and that no amount of communication will make them more palatable.

Tim Murtaugh, the former communications director for Donald Trump 2020 — a campaign that hauled in 13 million more votes than any other Republican campaign in history — has an excellent take: “Here’s the thing with liberals,” he said. “They rarely speak to anyone who disagrees with them, and so when their policies get rejected, they always conclude that it’s simply a messaging problem. The people don’t like the president, so we’ll just give them more!”

A new communications strategy that gives us more of Joe Biden? This won’t end well.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.