By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Joe Biden was never exactly a colossus bestriding
the Earth, but he’s been getting smaller by the day.
A Washington
Post poll over the
weekend suggested that his presidency is, for now, a smoking political crater.
It had him at a 41 percent approval rating, despite the passage of his
long-sought infrastructure bill that was supposed to buoy him and his party.
Even more striking, the survey found that Republicans
lead Democrats on the generic congressional ballot by 10 points, 51 percent to
41 percent, an unprecedentedly strong showing for the GOP that forecasts an
earthquake, tsunami, and maybe a few more natural disasters for Democrats come
next fall.
And who can be surprised? Biden is stumbling, out of
touch, and weak. Two of his major initiatives, at the border and
in Afghanistan, created completely avoidable catastrophes. He has given no
sense of being in control of events or even his own party. He is an accidental
president who is running smack into his own inadequacies and absurd
pretensions.
No one in Washington over the last four decades ever said
that Joe Biden was just the man with the foresight, wisdom, and deft political
touch to lead the free world.
No, he was an average senatorial bloviator whose first
two presidential campaigns flamed out in embarrassing fashion before he hit the
jackpot when Barack Obama chose him as his running mate in 2008.
Showing the advantage of hanging around for a very long
time, Biden won both the 2020 Democratic nomination and the presidency by
default. In the primaries, the former vice president looked good in comparison
to Bernie Sanders, and he ran in the general on not being Donald Trump.
Now, Biden is allied with Bernie Sanders, who helped
write the first version of his Build Back Better plan, and Donald Trump no
longer looms as large as Biden’s foil.
The best case for Biden’s presidency was that he could be
a kind of consensus caretaker — restoring a sense of normality and maintaining
a low profile while riding in the slipstream of improving economic conditions
and a diminishing pandemic.
Instead, he’s been carried along by the left-wing tide of
his party and repeatedly engaged in unconstitutional executive overreach. On
top of it all, he’s brought his own brand of incompetence, exemplified by the
botched pullout from Afghanistan.
His foremost mistake was overestimating an attenuated
electoral mandate for pedestrian governance as a permission slip for passing
nearly the entirety of the progressive agenda in the space of less than a year.
Not only has there been sticker shock over the price tag
of the Biden agenda, but it has little connection to things that people truly
care about. The infrastructure bill polls well, but no one goes about their
daily lives worried about the alleged crisis of crumbling bridges and tunnels.
Meanwhile, the Build Back Better bill started as a $3.5
trillion grab bag of everything that progressives want but couldn’t get in the
infrastructure bill. Passing as much spending as you possibly can before you
lose Congress a year from now, which is essentially the rationale behind Build
Back Better, is not a compelling reason for a historic spate of federal
spending.
That legislation has been pared down to largely a
child-care and climate-change bill. That’s an unnatural pairing that came about
not because those are the top two things that the public wants from Washington,
but because they happen to be what Democrats think they can pass.
Only now is the White House trying to argue that the
infrastructure bill and Build Back Better will address real public concerns,
namely the supply-chain disruptions and the inflation that is outpacing wage
growth. This is clearly a tendentious, after-the-fact argument.
The White House can hope that the supply-chain
bottlenecks ease and inflation declines, but Biden’s disastrous first year
speaks to a more intractable problem with the lackluster occupant of the Oval
Office himself.
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