Biden’s Year of Failure

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, January 20, 2022

 

Of all the many unbidden iniquities that have dogged President Biden since he took office, perhaps the most unjust of all is that bad things keep happening to the man after he has done something stupid. The phenomenon has been near Newtonian in its consistency. The president blows the Afghanistan withdrawal; his poll numbers crater in response. The president chases an agenda that he knows lacks the requisite votes; that agenda goes down in flames. The president issues an order that he’s acknowledged as a violation of the law; that order is nixed by the Supreme Court. The president terrifies a close ally; that ally expresses its disgust. And on and on it goes, as if gravity itself were in play. Action, meet reaction, meet the falling of the sword of Damocles.

 

Biden’s apologists like to excuse their charge’s shortcomings by pointing to the poisoned chalice he was handed. And, sure enough, this president did inherit an unenviable landscape. On the day that Biden became president, Covid was still raging, inflation was beginning to materialize, the global supply chain was showing signs of interruption, crime was on the rise, and the debt had hit record levels. The trouble is, Biden has been president for a full year and Covid is still raging, inflation is now at its highest level since 1982, the global supply chain remains interrupted, and crime, somehow, has worsened. As for the national debt? We are worse off than ever before.

 

When he asked for the job, Biden vowed that, by electing him, Americans would be reversing those trends. But that has not come close to being true. During his campaign, Biden vowed that he would “shut down the virus” and “grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” He hasn’t. In a million radio and TV ads, he guaranteed that he would “restore honor” to the White House. He hasn’t. In his inaugural address, he vowed that he would “stop the shouting, and lower the temperature” and “fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” He hasn’t.

 

Instead, he has proven himself to be every bit the vicious partisan that his critics expected. Instead, he has pursued a preposterously ambitious agenda — as if his party had 70 seats in the Senate, rather than 50. Instead, he has abandoned all talk of being an “institutionalist” and endorsed the wholesale destruction of the very norms he swore to uphold. Instead, he has started to sound like his predecessor, by questioning the integrity of American elections, dismissing polling out of hand, and refusing to draw bright lines with figures such as Vladimir Putin. I will grant that being a “caretaker” president is not the most exciting of prospects, even for a man as dull as Joe Biden. And yet that — and not indulging absurd, FDR-esque fantasies — is what the voters requested of both him and the closely balanced Congress that they returned to D.C. Competence, moderation, humility, experience, mindfulness — these were the qualities Biden promised the country. In his first year, he has exhibited none of them. Under President Biden, America has not returned to normal but become stranger than ever before. Why is his approval rating in the basement? How could it not be?

 

Yesterday’s press conference was Biden’s first in a couple of months, and, frankly, he would have been better off skipping it. The White House promised a “reset” but provided no evidence of any such thing. From start to finish, the president came across as an unfocused, unprepared, unserious, ill-tempered mess. He suggested that it would be fine if Russia invaded Ukraine so long as the move represented a “minor incursion.” He proposed that the 2022 midterms would be illegitimate if his coveted “voting rights” bills do not pass. He defended his handling of Afghanistan, despite the bipartisan condemnation of that affair. He attempted to sell his spending agenda as deflationary, though it was written before inflation took hold. He slammed Senator McConnell as an obstructionist who will do anything to make him look bad, forgetting that McConnell signed on to the same trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that Biden proclaimed as a victory in November. And he insisted, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, that he did not “overpromise” and has “outperformed” as president. The affair was an abject disaster, but it was also par for the course. And that, ultimately, is the problem.