Biden’s Blunders

By Matthew Continetti

Thursday, August 26, 2021

 

Four. That’s the number of crises Joe Biden said the nation faced when he accepted the 2020 Demo­cratic presidential nomination. His list included the coronavirus pandemic, the precarious economy, ensuring racial equity in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, and climate change. By the time Biden became president, he had added to his index of emergencies the fate of democracy, truth, and America’s role in the world. “Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways,” Biden said during his inaugural address. “But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.”

 

They are responsibilities that Biden cannot handle. Not only has he failed to solve the problems he identified during the campaign; he’s created a whole new set of challenges that run from America’s southern border to the Hindu Kush. As a result, the public has re-evaluated his conduct and capability. The buzzwords that filled coverage of Biden’s early days — “hypercompetent,” “normalcy,” “unity,” “transformative” — now seem inappropriate and silly. The comparisons that some pundits made last spring between Biden and LBJ, FDR, and Ronald Reagan were premature at the time. Now they just look ridiculous.

 

Every presidency has bad moments. What makes Biden’s rough patch notable is its suddenness and contingency. Only a few months ago, it might have seemed as if he was making progress on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. Unexpected developments, as well as unforced errors on the border and in Afghanistan, have now undermined confidence in his leadership and eroded his public standing. The Delta variant of the coronavirus, inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and national humiliation at the hands of the Taliban have done more than complicate Biden’s efforts to sign into law the largest expansion of government since the Great Society. They have put Democratic control of Congress at risk — and the country in jeopardy.

 

Biden is president because his priorities tracked closely with those of the 2020 electorate. Take the coronavirus pandemic. The plurality of voters who rated it the most important issue in a postelection poll by Fox News supported Biden two to one. While the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research had a slightly more complicated and confusing issue breakdown, it also showed that the voters who had rated either the pandemic or health-care policy as the most important issue went for Biden by lopsided margins.

 

Americans gave Biden’s coronavirus response high marks during the first half of the year. He took the pandemic seriously. His team ramped up production and distribution of the vaccines authorized for emergency use under his predecessor. In a March speech, Biden predicted that the summer of 2021 would “begin to mark our independence from this virus.” In May, the Centers for Disease Control announced that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to wear masks indoors. Case numbers and deaths plunged from January through July.

 

Then things got worse. The first sign that Biden wasn’t in charge of the situation came in April, when the Food and Drug Administration temporarily paused injections of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This decision arrested the momentum of the vaccination campaign and illustrated the dangers of bureaucratic caprice. Meanwhile, the Delta variant of the virus spread among the unvaccinated. Case numbers picked up. Hospitalizations and deaths followed. On July 27, the CDC reversed its previous guidance and recommended once again that vaccinated people in areas of high transmission wear masks indoors. The messages from public-health authorities were contradictory, confusing, and dispiriting. Biden seemed powerless.

 

What was once a political asset turned into a liability. Two-thirds of adults approved of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus in a February 2021 Gallup poll. By August, that number had dropped 16 points. “All party groups are now more critical of Biden’s handling of the corona­virus situation compared with February,” wrote pollster Jeffrey M. Jones, “with approval among Republicans and independents down roughly 20 points.” Moreover, independents have begun to disapprove of Biden’s performance in general. As recently as June, they gave him a job-approval rating of 55 percent. Only 43 percent of independents approved in August.

 

The pandemic was not even the only crisis in which Biden was flailing. The economy was never his best issue — voters for whom it was the top priority in 2020 went for Donald Trump — but the gradual recovery from the coronavirus-induced recession and the passage of the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan helped Biden’s standing at the beginning of his term. In the February Gallup poll, 54 percent of adults approved of his handling of the economy. By August, however, that rating had fallen to 46 percent.

 

The reason was inflation. Rising prices have increased the cost of living, diminished wage gains, and soured voters on the president’s economic management. In a Morning Consult poll from late July, 59 percent of registered voters blamed Biden for inflation. In early August, a Hill-HarrisX poll found that inflation was registered voters’ top economic worry. Around the same time, 86 percent of the registered voters surveyed in a Fox News poll said that it was a concern. The president’s response has been to downplay the threat. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and expected to be temporary,” Biden said in July. He hopes so.

 

Neither racial inequity nor climate change has proven any easier for Biden to fix. “For the second consecutive year, U.S. adults’ positive ratings of relations between Black and White Americans are at their lowest point in more than two decades of measurement,” wrote Gallup’s Megan Brenan in July. Judges have blocked Biden’s attempt to forgive the debts of minority farmers because it violates civil-rights law. Parents nationwide have rebelled against school boards eager to import critical race theory into the classroom. The Black Lives Matter movement has hemorrhaged support. In June 2020, as Biden planned his nomination-acceptance speech, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of U.S. adults found 57 percent of them approving Black Lives Matter. One year later, 42 percent of Americans approved.

 

The public is worried about crime. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll from early summer, two-thirds of adults said that crime had grown worse over the past year. One-third of adults said that they had witnessed a crime spike in their own neighborhood. Seventy percent of adults called for additional funding for police departments. Seventy-seven percent wanted more cops on the beat. Navigator, a Demo­cratic polling company, reported in July that majorities of Democrats, independents, Republicans, blacks, Hispanics, and whites considered violent crime a “major crisis.” In late June, as fears over public safety became unignorable, Biden tried to reframe the crime debate as an argument for gun control. His messaging flopped.

 

A similar atmosphere of irrelevance and impotence surrounds Biden’s climate policy. Biden reentered the Paris climate agreement but is far from reaching a deal to limit either China’s or India’s greenhouse-gas emissions. He signed a nonbinding, symbolic executive order calling for half of the new auto fleet manu­factured each year to be composed of electric vehicles by 2030. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, paused the issuance of new drilling leases on public lands and waters, suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that the Trump administration had approved, and is under pressure from the Left to restrict U.S. exports of liquid natural gas.

 

Yet Biden has a rather la-di-da attitude toward carbon emissions elsewhere. He acquiesced to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, which makes it possible for Vladimir Putin to cut off energy supplies to Ukraine without jeopardizing Western European markets. He asked OPEC to ramp up oil production, showing more concern for the domestic political cost of high gasoline prices than for the environmental and strategic costs of empowering the cartel. His negotiators in Vienna promised to drop sanctions on Iran’s energy sector if the Islamic Republic reenters the 2014 nuclear deal. The mullahs aren’t into solar panels.

 

None of these moves will appease Greta Thunberg. Nor will they lower energy prices for everyday Americans, reduce the trade deficit, or weaken America’s adversaries. They are the definition of counterproductive.

 

Biden also made a big show of undoing his predecessor’s immigration policies. He suspended construction of the border wall. He lifted the so-called Muslim ban on travel and immigration from 13 countries. He ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum-seekers to wait there as U.S. courts adjudicated their claims. He exited the “safe third country” agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that instructed migrants to apply for asylum in the first nation they entered. He exempted minors from “Title 42” protocols that allow for rapid deportation during public-health emergencies.

 

Guess what happened next. The number of individuals detained on the southern border swelled. Every month broke records. July was the busiest month on the border in 21 years. Never has the United States taken into custody more family units and unaccompanied minors. When the fiscal year ends on September 30, more than 1 million illegal migrants will have been detained. Many of them have been released into the U.S. interior.

 

Biden can neither explain nor stop the deluge. At first, he said that the surge was seasonal. It wasn’t. Then Vice President Harris traveled to Guatemala and told migrants not to come. They kept coming. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas recently told Border Patrol agents that “we can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.” Note his use of the present tense. The Trump administration did build a system that mostly secured the southern border. Biden wrecked it.

 

The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is another direct consequence of Biden’s ineptitude. His failure to plan for the chaos that would follow America’s exit resulted in a humanitarian disaster and a potential mass-hostage situation as some 6,000 U.S. troops evacuated tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghan partners from a single airport in Kabul ringed by Taliban checkpoints. Biden’s word has been exposed as worthless. He said that the Afghan army wouldn’t fall to the Taliban. It did. He said that al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan. It is. He said that our allies haven’t questioned America’s credi­bility. They have. The British parliament held the withdrawal in contempt, and former British prime minister Tony Blair called the logic behind it “imbecilic.”

 

That’s an understatement. As the 78-year-old Biden gets ready to exit the political arena, he seems intent on recreating the conditions that prevailed when he entered it a half century ago. Inflation, crime, American retreat — these hallmarks of the 1970s have returned. And they have joined postmodern threats, such as a worldwide pandemic, unchecked migration, climate change, and the global jihadist-Salafist movement. Biden has been president for less than a year. The number of crises buffeting American politics, economics, society, and culture already has multiplied beyond his control.

 

In the run-up to the 2020 campaign, President Obama reportedly told a fellow Democrat, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” No one will make that mistake anytime soon.