#Biden’s disappointing prime-time speech was a con job

Low as our expectations were, President Biden still disappointed with his speech Thursday night.

We’re supposed to hope that if all goes well, we can gather with a few others outdoors to celebrate Independence Day? Sorry, sir, we can do that now. And Americans by the tens if not hundreds of millions are.

And in Texas, Florida and other states, they’ll be packing stadiums by Memorial Day — with precautions, sure. But half the country’s done with extreme cautions.

Whether Biden knew it or not (and how would he?), the whole thing reeked of what another president, in a very different context, called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

He made a big deal of upping the vaccine supply, something that was hardwired in long before he took office. Anyone in the Oval Office would have built on the progress already made to do that.

And he’s still pretending his goals for jabs nationwide were bold, when the nation had already met that daily total by Inauguration Day. And in claiming the United States leads the world, he’s ignoring Israel. (But we fear he’s going to be making a habit of that.)

Same but worse for his targets on reopening schools, where he’s actually backtracked. Yet all the science says it should be done yesterday, not weeks or months down the line.

Part of it, we guess, is that he needed to accentuate the negative to justify his $1.9 trillion spending spree, even though most of it has nothing to do with relief, recovery or the virus, but only rewarding his party’s special interests and ideologues.

The whole thing felt like a con job, trying to sell Americans a bridge they already own. Our only question is whether the president knows that, or he simply has no clue.