Maligned by Republicans and Democrats, Biden still seems to be scoring for Americans

In cutting future Hall of Fame wide receiver Cris Carter early in his career, Philadelphia Eagles head coach Buddy Ryan famously groused, “All he does is catch touchdowns.” Democrats seem to feel that way about their own president: All he does is deliver.

Republicans, whose contribution to the political discourse over the past two years has been to couple the president’s name with various profanities, once again thought they had Uncle Joe right where they wanted him.

Because they exist in their own echo chambers, they believed the Fox pundits and the conservative pollsters who flooded the zone with overly optimistic results in order to skew the popular poll aggregators at 538 and RealClearPolitics.

The Democrats, who have never been entirely happy with their Toyota Camry of a president and yearned for something faster and flashier, were all too willing to buy into the narrative; their old ride had finally broken down and it was time to start shopping for something new.

There was Donald Trump, cooking up some showy election bid announcement where he planned to take credit for the Red Wave. There were the hardcore anti-democracy candidates who all but ran on the singular promise that they would hand future elections to Republicans, regardless of the vote count. There were Democratic gun-jumpers, filtering into New Hampshire to test out names of prospective 2024 Biden replacements to see how they’d fly.

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But Wednesday morning as the dust was settling, there was Biden, still standing, smoke wafting from the barrel of his Colt as the corpse of the Big Lie of 2020 lay convulsing in the dirt.

One more notch for the president who got us out of Afghanistan, is rebuilding our roads, bridges and antiquated utilities, has overseen the framework for a transfer to renewable energy, convinced chipmakers to build manufacturing plants here instead of overseas, united NATO against Vladimir Putin, improved health care, presided over historic job gains and kept levels of pandemic- and war-related related inflation and fuel prices in better check than the leaders of most developed nations.

But all he does is catch touchdowns.

In his classic Trumpese, the former president predicted that if his candidates won he would get no credit, but if they lost he would get all the blame. But isn’t that exactly the Biden paradigm?

Unexpectedly in a position to have to explain their success, Democrats pointed to reproductive rights, higher-quality candidates and young voters who grew up terrified of school gun violence.

You know, nothing that has to do with Joe Biden.

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Republicans, meanwhile, have an even more difficult lift. They’ve developed twin story lines where President Biden on one hand is a doddering old fool scarcely able to form a full sentence, and on the other is this exceedingly cunning genius who is so fiendishly capable as to be able to thwart at every turn those who stand for freedom, justice and the American Way. Whatever.

There may be a third explanation for Tuesday’s results that no one seems to be considering: The old man knows what he’s doing. The president himself has tied a profanity to his name, being caught on a hot mic telling a constituent “No one f---s with a Biden.”

This was during the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, where the federal government came to the cool, effective, professional assistance of distressed Floridians. Compare that to the ham-handed reaction of the George W. Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina. And consider that if Biden had allowed Florida to wallow in distress alone, as Bush did with Louisiana, Gov. Ron DeSantis — potentially a Biden challenger for the presidency — would not have won re-election by 20 points.

This is quintessentially American. If fellow citizens are in need, you have their back, regardless of their politics. Something else that is quintessentially American is our right to vote, with the expectation that our vote will matter. If you have listened to Biden, that’s been the fundamental drumbeat for the past six months.

He set his target squarely on those who refused to acknowledge that, in a democracy, one side doesn’t always win. Certainly issues drove various people to the polls for various reasons. But the thread of unification, the seed Biden planted, was the implicit understanding that in one-party rule, even the majority’s opinion of an issue means squat.

Voters got the message. In race after race, advocates of single-party rule went down to defeat. In photos of what was supposed to be a Mar-a-Lago victory party, a tormented Trump looked awful, much like that night he was released from the hospital following his bout with COVID.

No one reads public sentiment like Trump, and he seemed to sense that the feeble, addled, incompetent Joe Biden, bane of Republicans and Democrats alike and approved of by no one, had just come down in his end zone. Again.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Biden's winning strategy: Help fellow citizens, protect right to vote