Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with.

Namely, how to get off the defensive.

How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure, one after another, were tossed up at him?

Biden entered knowing what issues would be paramount and what questions would be raised:

Why had he been unable to control a coronavirus pandemic now killing 2,000 Americans a day? Why was he unable to contain an inflation eating up the wages, salaries and savings of American families at a yearly rate of 7%? Why was he unable to secure a southern border that 150,000 illegal immigrants were crossing every month?

To get off the defensive and onto offense, Biden brought his own questions for his GOP inquisitors and conservative critics:

“What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for,” Biden demanded to know.

Turning the tables, Biden charged his Republican critics with having no policy goals, other than the willful obstruction of his goals.

“The fundamental question is: What’s Mitch (McConnell) for? … What’s he for on immigration? What’s he for? What’s he proposing to make anything better? … What’s he for on these things? What are they for?”

Biden was making the case that while the Democratic Party has an agenda of declared goals, providing benefits to millions, the GOP is the party of “No.”

Why not fight our battles on this terrain for a change? Biden was demanding. And, behind his exasperation, he has a point.

Democrats do have an agenda. They do have things they want to accomplish. And the party of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is basically an opposition party whose goal is to prevent them from succeeding.

There is another reason Biden would like to force Republicans to identify their goals. Naming them would reveal the divisions inside the GOP on priorities and open Republicans up to the kind of attacks the GOP is mounting against Biden’s agenda.

In short, behind Biden’s demand that the GOP identify its goals was an attempt to shift the debate onto terrain more familiar and favorable for the Democratic Party.

For the truth is that Democrats are the party of government, and Republicans are the party of the private sector. These are their historic roles. Biden is seeking to re-elevate that critical difference.

Democrats, for example, are almost unanimous in their support of federally funded universal pre-K, child care, the child tax credit, student loan forgiveness and federal standards for voting in federal elections.

Historically, Democrats led the fight for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, civil rights, voting rights, welfare and most of the rest of a federal monolith that now consumes perhaps a fourth of our GDP.

Republicans have been the party that resisted the expansion of government over our lifetimes, and its role has often been to conduct an orderly retreat to a new defense perimeter after the most recent defeat.

The most celebrated Republican of the last century was Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Republicans have emphasized, as a major role of government, providing the security that citizens cannot provide for themselves.

Security against crime and violence, security against an invasion of the country, security against hostile foreign powers.

Biden’s problem is that while millions might agree on aspects of his Build Back Better plan, the present primary concerns of the electorate are those government duties that his party is visibly failing to perform: controlling the pandemic, stopping the shootings and killings of cops, halting the invasion across our southern border, preventing the loss of incomes and savings to inflation.

Yet, despite the imperiled position of Biden’s party today, it has relative strengths and long-term trends in its favor.

America’s white majority, home to the base of the GOP, is a diminishing majority, on average older than the core constituencies of the Democratic Party — the young, the migrants and people of color.

Second, the Democratic mega-states in presidential elections — California, New York, Illinois — seem solidly blue, while Republican mega-states like Texas and Florida seem less solidly red.

Third, America’s major media centered in New York and Washington, D.C., is liberal and Democratic, as are our cultural institutions — museums, Hollywood, higher education, the entertainment industry.

Fourth, the trend for democracies is toward transferring more and more power to central governments, not less. Under President Calvin Coolidge, the U.S. government share of GDP was 3%.

As for the culture wars, traditionalism has been in retreat since the 1950s.

Biden appears to be a failing president who believes in the inevitable victory of the ideology toward which he himself has been moving over his half-century career since arriving in Washington as a 30-year-old centrist Democrat.

Unfortunately, he may not be wrong.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

In 2018, the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) issued its 25th annual commencement-speaker survey which revealed that the nation’s top 100 universities – as rated by U.S. News & World Report – had invited many liberal or leftist ideologues, newsmakers, authors, and entrenched Washington insiders to speak at their graduation ceremonies that year; by contrast, few conservative speakers had been invited. This imbalance represented the continuation of a pattern that already had been well established for many years. Announcing the results of its study, YAF wrote:

The 25th Annual Commencement Speakers Survey from Young America’s Foundation shows the leftist slant at America’s colleges pervades the final lessons given to graduating students as they turn their tassels and collect their diplomas. The small number of conservative speakers (just four this year) is again eclipsed by a number of prominent liberals (45) who were invited by the nation’s top colleges and universities to impart one last skewed lesson.

YAF’s Commencement Speakers Survey scrutinizes the commencement addresses given at the top 100 national universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. With 45 liberal speakers imparting progressive ideas and just 4 conservatives addressing graduates, the contrast in this year’s survey is stunning.

Vice President Mike Pence is the most notable and only national conservative figure speaking at any of America’s top colleges. Ambassador Ron Dermer, NBA commentator Ernie Johnson, and Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum are the other three conservatives delivering commencement addresses in 2017.

The Left’s childish reaction to Vice President Mike Pence’s commencement address at Notre Dame proves the pervasion of liberal intolerance. Even when conservatives are given the rare opportunity to address students, leftists won’t even consider an alternative viewpoint. In a tragic irony, the infantile leftists who walked out at Notre Dame proved the exact point he made about the “all-too-common practices” of the Left being “destructive of learning and the pursuit of knowledge …  wholly outside the American tradition.”

The class of 2017 will hear from [former] Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Cory Booker, Bob Casey, Tammy Duckworth, and Elizabeth Warren who continually spout flawed, debunked, and failed ideas.

Other outspoken liberals including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Billie Jean King, Ken Burns, Michael Bloomberg, and Sheryl Sandberg will be speaking at some of America’s top-rated schools.

Leftist figures from Hollywood also made the rounds, including Michael J. Fox, S. Epatha Merkerson, Steve Levitan, Nick Offerman, Helen Mirren, Pharrell Williams, and Will Ferrell.

A number of news personalities are slated to speak at commencement exercises this spring, including Frank Bruni (New York Times), Jake Tapper (CNN), Brooke Baldwin(CNN), Christiane Amanpour (CNN), and Stephanie Ruhe (MSNBC). Notably missing from the list of commencement speakers at America’s Top 100 universities are any personalities from the Fox News or Fox Business channels.

The bias against conservatives becomes even more clear when 2017 is compared to the first year of President Obama’s tenure. Apart from Vice President Mike Pence, no members of President Trump’s administration are speaking at top 100 schools this spring. In 2009, 11 commencement addresses were delivered at top 100 schools who fell over themselves to host members of Obama’s campaign and White House teams. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Attorney General Eric Holder, campaign manager David Plouffe, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel joined President Obama and Vice President Biden in pushing their liberal agenda.

This slant against conservative commencement speakers is an unfortunate and alarming trend Young America’s Foundation has documented for the past 24 years….

“YAF provides the intellectual diversity that far too many leftist administrators work to suppress today,” [said Young America’s Foundation spokesman Spencer Brown]. “America’s top colleges and universities are out of touch with America’s young people, and continue to rob students of the chance to think critically. Instead, these ‘leading’ institutions feed students a never-ending stream of one-sided lessons. That’s not education, it’s indoctrination.”

From my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and GETTR posts of the last 24 hours.

Can a “commander in chief” with a 33 percent approval rating make himself popular by starting a war of no interest to Americans?

****************

Why does freedom for Ukraine matter so much, while freedom for Americans doesn’t matter at all?

****************

Even swamp thing OSHA has more respect for the Supreme Court’s ruling on vax mandate than Biden and his fellow thugs. Impeach Bidenistas, and then arrest them.

****************

Putin is an evil tyrant, but he’s far away. The Biden regime is full of evil tyrants, and they are at our front doors.

****************

Wanting to control other people’s bodies with masks and vax mandates is sick. Using police and armies to force your will on them is EVIL.

****************

If the world has gone mad — and it plainly has — then, to figure out the cause, you must start in academia. They have been at this for decades, since at least the 1960s. And Jordan Peterson has been up close and personal at the scene of the crime.

Two samples from this great article:

“…Wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?”

And: “the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason