Biden Betting on the Middle? Not Likely.

There's an old saw about politics and politicians:

Q: You know what you find in the middle of the road?

A: Yellow stripes and dead skunks.

Speaking of skunks, the Biden administration is now being accused of something it has never done - running to the middle of the road. It's important to point out that there's a difference between being moderate and trying to have things both ways.

President Biden is betting on the middle.
Biden, a centrist Democrat who defeated several more progressive rivals in the 2020 primary, this week offered criticism of the college campus protests engulfing the nation, saying they would not change his policies on Israel’s war in Gaza and would not be protected when they turned violent.
The words were measured. Biden said people had a right to protest, and the president has signaled his unhappiness with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But it was also a clear signal that Biden believes the broad middle of the country is behind his approach to the protests, even as Republicans go on the attack by calling him impotent and saying he’s done too little to curtail divisive protests.

Road apples!

The Biden administration has been anything but centrist. Old Joe himself has slipped away, mentally, some time ago. It's becoming more obvious, day by day, that he's not only not the guy in charge but has very little idea what's happening.

"The words were measured" is evidently code for "the Biden administration tried to pander to both sides and came off looking impotent," because that's what happened. While the responsibility for dealing with these little hooligans that are rioting on our college campuses lies with local prosecutors and district attorneys, there is a role for the President to play in a national issue like this - demonstrating a little leadership wouldn't be the worst idea, instead of the weak sauce coming from the White House.

Most of the Biden administration's policies have been anything but moderate. One of the incoming administration's first actions was to throw the southern border open to all and sundry, with the result that since January 2021 millions have entered the country illegally and been welcomed. The administration's recent Title IX amendments are unforgivably pandering to the "T" portion of the LGBTQ set.

The Biden administration is anti-growth, anti-energy, and anti-Second Amendment, and has never seen a tax increase that it wasn't in favor of. And the utter cluelessness of the messaging! While old Joe is gifting the execrable Nancy Pelosi with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, Donald Trump is taking pizzas to New York City firefighters, one of whom pleaded, "Sir, save us!"

The Biden administration's actions show what this administration is all about. The positions it takes are not moderate. Throwing open the floodgates to unscreened, unvetted illegal aliens from every third-world country in the world is not a moderate position. Forcing schools to not only let boys and young men compete on girls' sports teams - and to allow them in the girls' locker rooms - is not a moderate position. The closest the Biden administration has come to moderation is when it is, as in the campus riots, trying to thread the needle of keeping the support of some sane people while keeping the support of, candidly, lunatics.

It's painfully apparent that the Biden administration's people in charge of messaging are topped up with the malodorous assimilated residue of the digestive process of the male bovine. Voters are paying attention.

The Biden campaign may be trying to cater to the middle; in fact, it is losing it. And the primary beneficiary of old Joe's decline? Donald John Trump. The Hill piece (linked at the beginning) continues:

“When it looks like the country is in chaos visually, it’s bad for Biden. It just so happens that the chaos is at the epicenter of the picture of woke elitism, which happens to be a huge turn off to a large swath of Americans,” said a former Biden 2020 campaign official.
Trump, for his part, is trying to cast Biden as being part of the woke mob, or too weak to battle it. In that context, Biden’s remarks are a pushback to the Trump campaign and Republicans.

Trump, for his part, is succeeding. As of this writing, former President Donald Trump is continuing to pull ahead of Pres. Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and holds a narrow lead in all of RCP's top battleground states.

Dead skunks, indeed.