What Do Bidenomics and the President’s Grandchild Have to Do with Each Other? Everything.

Joe Biden recently unveiled the term “Bidenomics” to express and encompass the positive economic news—and there’s a lot of it—that he hopes will lift him to reelection.

Also recently unveiled—not by Biden, but about him, and presumably against his preferences—is the existence of four-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, a grandchild of the president whom he has never publicly acknowledged.*

Why do I juxtapose these two seemingly unrelated developments? Because they may not be so unrelated after all. The media coverage of both tells us a lot about the political culture we inhabit today. It’s a culture that has been shaped and defined by the political right, and it works almost entirely to their advantage. In sum: We live now in a political culture where the party that is trying to uphold some standards and values gets judged and punished because it sometimes falls short of those standards and values, while the party that makes no effort along those lines gets away with everything because no one expects any better of it in the first place.