Feehery: Traitor to his class

President Biden shares one attribute with his political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

It was said that the Brahmin-born elite Roosevelt was a traitor to his class because he spent so much of his time and energy attacking the very wealthiest in American society during the Great Depression. 

Unlike FDR, lunch-bucket Joe came from far more humble beginnings, if we are to believe his self-written biography. He is a kid from Scranton, Pa., whose family worked in the coal mines, an Irish Catholic from the wrong side of the street, a former lifeguard who hung out with the Black kids in his neighborhood.

It all makes for an appealing rags-to-riches story, meant to appeal to the vast working class that decides most elections in this country. 

But like FDR, Biden as president has become a traitor to his class. 

His family might have worked in the steel mills and the coal mines, but to Joe Biden and his elitist administration, goal one is to get rid of fossil fuels, especially coal mining. If there is one thing that the other famous Joe, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), understands, it is the precarious situation of the coal miners in West Virginia, which is one of the reasons he opposed the Build Back Better imbroglio. Manchin knows that Biden is a traitor to the coal mining class, and he has adjusted accordingly.

The Biden administration’s attitude to rising gas prices is akin to Marie Antoinette’s attitude towards starving peasants in Revolutionary-era France. Instead of saying let them eat cake, Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation secretary, said let them drive Teslas. That’s not an exact quote, but the French Queen was misquoted too, and look what happened to her. 

Nobody is talking about decapitating members of the Biden administration. They are doing a fine enough job of committing political hara-kiri, all on their own. 

Gas prices started to increase the day Joe Biden stepped into office, not because Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, but instead because Biden’s team wanted gas prices to increase. They did that by taking dramatic steps to make it harder for oil and gas companies to explore for oil and gas here in America. This is not a bug in the Biden policy agenda; it’s a feature. Their biggest donors believe that we need to transition to a carbon-free future immediately, because that is what the patron saint of the religion of Global Warming, Al Gore, says we must do. And so, that’s what the Democrats are doing, no matter how hard it hits the working class. 

These are the same elites who have clung on to COVID-19 mask mandates. They themselves don’t wear masks out in public (that’s for the little people), but servers and children must be made bow down to the government, despite little actual evidence that wearing masks has made one iota of difference in the spread of the virus. 

The Biden administration’s latest assault on the working class comes with their inflationary policies. Inflation doesn’t discomfort the comfortable. They can tell their portfolio managers to switch from equities to commodities and they will probably ride out, the storm with more assets than they ever had before. But for the working class, paying 50 bucks more a week for groceries is a real hardship, especially if coupled with 25 bucks more a tank of gas and 100 bucks more a month for electricity bills. 

Biden isn’t solely responsible for inflation. The Fed’s loose monetary policies were bound to catch up with them eventually. But by crowding out private sector spending with an extraordinary amount of federal spending, Biden and the Democrats made the bad situation much worse. And now they are going to get the blame, and deservedly so. 

Working-class voters used to make up the heart and the soul of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden used to understand those voters instinctively. But Biden has lost touch with their hopes and their fears, and he is seen by the bulk of them to be a traitor to his class. And not in a good way.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).