A TERRIBLE EX-JOURNALIST SHOWS US WHY WE GOT TRUMP AGAIN

You might have seen this a few days ago:

A Gallup poll suggests that President Joe Biden will be viewed as the worst commander in chief since Richard Nixon....

Respondents were asked how they thought presidents would go down in history—"as an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?"

The poll found that among U.S. adults Biden received a net score of -35—the percentage Outstanding/Above Average minus the percentage Below Average/Poor.

The only president to receive a lower score was Nixon, with -42.

Biden has made his share of mistakes, and I suspect that a period of high inflation piled on top of forty years of increasing economic inequality left a lot of Americans with deep credit-card debt at high interest rates. Based on that record alone, his unpopularity was probably inevitable. But is he the worst president since Nixon? Why?

You probably know my thinking on this: Voters believe Biden is a terrible president because he's the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. His public speaking deficits and physical presence prevent him from being a reassuring voice at moments of uncertainty. He's done a fine job on many fronts, but he doesn't seem competent.

Is that what people want from leaders? Do they really believe that seeming like a leader is what's most important? Amy Chozick certainly feels that way, by her own admission.

You might remember Amy Chozick. She was a terrible Wall Street Journal political reporter who in 2008 wrote a story suggesting that Barack Obama might not win the presidential election because he wasn't fat enough.

"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," [a] Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The story strongly implied that this was a spontaneous outpouring of contempt, but it was later determined that Chozick had started a Yahoo thread with the express purpose of eliciting this opinion, and that exactly one commenter said what she wanted to hear. The Journal later issued a clarification. Undaunted, Chozick went on to a job at The New York Times, wrote a bestselling book about her time covering the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and is now a writer and producer in Hollywood.

The Times just published an op-ed in which Chozick laments the fact that none of the politicians dealing with California's wildfires seem like leaders she admired in the past -- many of whom were incompetent:

I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré, “a John Wayne dude,” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”

In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

Chozick knows Cuomo resigned in disgrace, and knows he didn't really do a good job during COVID. She's aware that Giuliani has disgraced himself, though she may not recall that he stupidly ordered New York City's emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center after it was bombed in 1993, and hadn't replaced the radios that had failed first responders in 1993 by the time of the 2001 attack. Also, she seems to recall the response to Katrina as a success because one of the key figures had swagger.

Maybe Chozick isn't quite the living embodiment of that famous Bill Clinton remark:

"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."

Donald Trump isn't doing it for her.

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming the devastation in Los Angeles on Democratic policies.

But, of course, neither is President Biden, as far as she's concerned, despite the guarantee of federal assistance that Biden has provided (and Trump threatens to withhold):

Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows?

She doesn't care if everything that can possibly be done is being done in a situation of unprecedented awfulness -- she wants to be told it's being done right:

We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose....

I’ve watched all of this enraged, but also beside myself. Why is it that the town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, there was The Slap but he still saved the world) cannot find a lead character to try to save us from this catastrophe? This state loves a charismatic action hero so much that it birthed The Terminator’s political career.

You know all those actors were playing fictional characters, don't you, Amy?

Chozick wants stirring words and manly bearing. I think that's what millions of Americans wanted from Joe Biden the last four years, and they never got it. That's why he's one of the most despised presidents of our time. After a while, it didn't matter what he did or didn't do. All that mattered is how he seemed.

Mayor Karen Bass certainly isn't doing it for Chozick, and Chozick is sure many people agree with her:

On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.

Of course, anyone in the world can sign a Change.org petition -- I signed it from here in New York using a fake email address and the fake name "Dick Hertz."

But I think what Chozick from politicians is what a lot of Americans want. Some of them think they're getting stirring words and manly bearing from Donald Trump, and that's why he won. Very few Americans think they can get these things from Joe Biden, and that's why Democrats lost.