(Kansas City) Joe Biden arrived in Missouri on Wednesday to tout his big investment plans, which so far have fallen flat with deeply pessimistic American households.
The US president landed around 1 p.m. local time (2 p.m. EST) in Kansas City, in the central US state, to visit the local transportation authority.
He is due to give a speech in a hangar where the White House has hung banners with a brand new slogan, “Building a Better America”, and linking to a brand new web page.
Missouri, a pro-Trump state
This Midwestern state, a vast agricultural region of the United States stretching from the Great Lakes to the center of the country, voted overwhelmingly in favor of former President Donald Trump last year.
The US executive has released figures on the profits that Missouri will derive from the gigantic infrastructure plan recently promulgated by Joe Biden, totaling $ 1.2 trillion.
The state will be able to renovate bridges and pipelines but also buy electric buses, assures the US executive.
Joe Biden is increasing the number of trips across the United States to try to rally the Americans around this project, and to arouse their enthusiasm for another huge project: a social spending bill of 1750 billion dollars, hotly debated in Congress at the moment.
But the 79-year-old Democrat’s efforts have so far fallen flat.
The White House is therefore increasing its communication efforts, like this new website on which citizens are invited to say, in video, all the good they think of the fast internet networks and the renovated highways promised by the President.
Pessimistic Americans
A very recent survey from Wall Street Journal estimates that only 41% of Americans are satisfied with the action of the Democratic president.
This does not bode well for the mid-term legislative elections scheduled for a year in the United States, a ballot historically unfavorable to the presidential camp.
Perhaps more worrying for a Joe Biden who relies on purchasing power and the hope of social progress to seduce the middle class: 61% of those questioned believe that the American economy is going in the wrong direction.
And this despite robust growth and a fall in unemployment, relegated to the background by a surge of inflation which worries households and which the White House has been slow to take into account.
The president’s communicators are therefore regularly questioned on their strategy, in particular on the president’s meager interactions with journalists.
If Joe Biden often answers, in a few concise words, the questions that reporters shout at him after a speech or at the foot of Air Force One, he gives little or no formal interviews, nor long lectures by hurry.
On the other hand, he multiplies the speeches, hammering the same formulas on the need to “give a little air” to the middle class or to make “pay their fair share” to the richest, the same family anecdotes, the same international comparisons on the exorbitant price of drugs or childcare in the United States, at the risk of boring.
Editorial writers get lost in speculation about this gulf between rather encouraging economic statistics and its unpopularity.
Is it the fault of a pandemic that tires Americans? Relentless and virulent attacks by Republican supporters of Donald Trump? Internal wars in the Democratic camp?
Or is Joe Biden, the old politician, paying the price for wanting to rule at the center in an increasingly polarized country?
“No one can say for sure why public opinion so quickly turned so bitter. Biden is like a patient with a disease that cannot be diagnosed, ”the New York Magazine.