The hand-wringing going on all day yesterday among Democrats and their media stenographers was completely understandable. Tuesday’s election wasn’t just a “disappointing” day for the Party of the Donkey. It was, if you’ll pardon my language, what my father used to call “an old-fashioned ass-kicking.” The Democrats weren’t just losing marginal seats in purple districts. They were losing races and ballot initiatives in some of their traditional strongholds. As we continue to crunch the numbers, it is a safe bet that we’ll learn that independent voters abandoned the Democrats in droves and even registered Democrats weren’t inspired to turn out in serious numbers.

But there’s one person who apparently isn’t worried and that would be President Joe Biden. While celebrating the arrival of vaccinations for children, Biden told reporters that he was confident that people just need “a little breathing room” and that the voters will come around once Congress passes his spending agenda. The fact that Uncle Joe seems to be nearly the only person feeling that way didn’t appear to dawn on him. (Associated Press)

But with some on the left warning that Democrats face a five-alarm fire, Biden is making the case that the electorate’s mood — and Democratic fortunes — will improve when he gets Congress to pass his domestic agenda.

“People need a little breathing room. They’re overwhelmed. And what happened was I think we have to just produce results for them to change their standard of living and give them a little more breathing room,” Biden said Wednesday.

The president parsed the election results after delivering remarks at the White House to showcase federal approval of COVID-19 shots for young children, pronouncing it “a day of relief and celebration” for families.

To a certain extent, you might understand how Biden would be trying to play down the losses. As President, part of his job is to be the cheerleader in chief for his party and keep up everyone’s spirits. But listening to him speak, he sounds to me like he actually believes what he’s saying. Is this a sign of delusional behavior? After what we’ve seen over the past nine months or so, you can’t rule that out entirely.

In basing his analysis on the idea that everything will be fine once his party “gets things done” by passing his massive BBB bill, Joe Biden is probably filling the role of being the true leader of his party because the Democrats still appear to be in denial. The lesson that needs to be taken from Tuesday’s drubbing goes far beyond partisan quibbling. A significant majority of the American people simply don’t like the current Democratic agenda, nor do they care for what they see unfolding during the Biden presidency. That should have been made obvious on Tuesday.

People don’t like bail reform and criminals roaming the streets. They don’t like to see their stores closing because Democrats keep decriminalizing looting. They don’t want to defund the police and actually desire more police protection. They don’t like failed foreign policy initiatives and severe mismanagement of our military. And they are not yearning for socialism in a free and democratic nation.

Certainly, there will be some popular support for some of the “free money and free stuff” in Biden’s bloated spending bill. But the underlying policies driving the Democratic Party at the moment are not at all popular. Democrats can’t seem to get that through their heads. People didn’t vote for Joe Biden to remake our entire social fabric into some sort of leftist paradise with Che Guevara posters in every storefront window. If anything, he won over the support of moderate voters who just wanted him to return the country to some sort of pre-Trump “normalcy.” Instead, they found themselves with a president who pictured himself as the next FDR and LBJ rolled into one with some sort of “new deal” that would reshape the world.

The problem for Biden and the Democrats is that a lot of people were mostly fine with the world they had. Sure, there are always problems and challenges to solve, but America was still functional. If anything, they wanted to see the nation they grew up in be further improved, not completely remade. I wonder if many Democrats are starting to realize that this week, even if Joe Biden apparently doesn’t.