Incredible shrinking Dems

HEART be still, but America is in the early stages of what could be a major political shift. On issue after issue, from soaring crime to inflation to critical race theory, Democrats and the far left are being forced to play defense because their radical policies are failing.

Those policies moved to the forefront with Joe Biden’s election and the elevation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to budget chairman. The resulting socialjustice and climate-change agenda would “totally transform America,” Biden promised.

But less than a year later, the results are disastrous. The effort to reshape the nation is clashing with reality — and reality is winning.

The outcome is far from certain, but developments make me an optimist. The green shoots of sanity are all around us and are verified by Biden’s collapsing poll numbers, and recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere.

With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of the death of the political center were exaggerated. It is alive and well, and holding its ground against the socialist onslaught.

Certainly the White House sees the trend, and is feverishly hunting for any news it can say is good. Biden called a minor dip in gasoline prices “significant” and his team released a chart showing the average price falling.

True, it had — by 2 cents a gallon, after rising by more than $1.30 in the last year.

The chart drew scoffs on Twitter, but the joke was lost on the Democrats’ campaign committee, which retweeted the graphic with: “Thanks, Joe Biden.”

Thanks for nothing would have been more appropriate! Or maybe Biden should thank Russia and OPEC for increasing oil production as he aims to limit America’s output.

Ditto for Friday’s dismal jobs report, which the president could hail as “incredible news” only because he cited just the unemployment rate of 4.2 percent.

As even Biden-friendly CNBC put it, the president “glossed over the weak” jobs total, which came to only 210,000 for November, against a estimate of more than 500,000. It was the worst month for new jobs all year--but it’s “incredible news” for a desperate White House.

Under any president, there would be pushback and criticism on some policies. But Biden is taking an extra pounding because he put all his chips on extreme nostrums of the kind he scoffed at for most of his career.

As a result, Calamity Joe has a staggering list of failures, and nary a success in sight.

Even his vice president, Kamala Harris, is looking like a dud of historic proportions. Four people from her public relations team are leaving, as if her 28 percent approval rating is their fault.

Biden is taking an additional pounding over his declining faculties. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that only 40 percent of respondents agreed he “is in good health,” while 50 percent disagreed. That 10-point gap represents an enormous 29-point swing since just last year, when the same question found voters believed Biden was in good health by a 19-point margin.

On that front, last week’s lowlights included the president’s tall tale about visiting Israel in 1967 and being a liaison for Prime Minister Golda Meir. Two problems: Biden was in law school in 1967 and Meir didn’t become prime minister until 1969.

Not all the administration’s actions and inactions are harmless. Biden was virtually silent about the riots that rocked American cities in the summer of 2020, and still can’t give a straight answer about the continuing crime surge.

Press secretary Jen Psaki even claimed Thursday the pandemic is a “root cause” of organized looting incidents. She didn’t explain how the pandemic led gangs of 30 or 40 men to use hammers and crow bars to smash windows and steal luxury dresses and jewelry.

The New York Times is certainly doing its part in excusemaking. In a rush to defend the no-cash bail laws turning courthouses into revolving doors, the Times sent two reporters to Waukesha, Wis.

To judge from their work, the assignment was to find an excuse in the case of Darrell E. Brooks Jr., charged with ramming his maroon Ford Escape into a Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring dozens more, many of them children.

Dutifully, reporters Glenn Thrush and Shaila Dewan concluded that the measly $1,000 bail set in a previous case of violence, also involving his SUV, that put Brooks back on the street was not part of the low-bail movement, but was in fact the “result of happenstance and other factors.”

With a sense of mission accomplished, the duo wrote that “The backlash raised fears that the fatal episode would set back efforts across the country geared at reducing the incarceration of poor defendants awaiting trial because they cannot afford bail.”

In other words, don’t judge the policy by its failures and excesses. Only its intentions matter.

Apparently the reporters never heard the maxim that the “road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Despite its obsession with race, the Times didn’t mention that Brooks is black and his victims white. Or that he previously spewed anti-white racism on social media and praised Hitler.

Then again, I could find only two Times stories on the mass murder, illustrating how a story gets disappeared when the facts are inconvenient to the paper’s agenda.

Fortunately, the corrupt media notwithstanding, many Americans are well-informed about the results of Biden’s presidency. Which is why I believe change is coming.