By Rich Lowry
Friday, April 15, 2022
Joe Biden is falling down on his promise to bring
normality back to the presidency for a basic reason — he’s not
normal.
Biden’s long pedigree, conventional politics, and
contrast with Donald Trump suggested that he’d bring predictability
and calm to the highest reaches of the nation’s politics.
The press touted this impending shift. A headline
in Financial Times announced, “Biden signals return to
normality on first day as president.” The CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza
opined, “The single most radical thing that Biden has done in his first 48
hours of being president is act totally and completely normally.”
Yeah, well, a funny thing happened on the way to renewed
normality — President Biden has engaged in one bizarre escapade after another
as he’s crashed his presidency into the rocks of incompetence, tone-deafness,
and stubbornly misplaced priorities.
It’s not normal for a president to say things flagrantly
at odds with his own administration’s position, but there was Joe Biden the
other day saying that Vladimir Putin is committing genocide in Ukraine.
This statement fared about as well as his declaration
that Vladimir Putin has to be removed from power, or the distinction he made
between a Russian invasion or “minor incursion” at a press conference prior to
the war.
The president, his aides said of his latest meandering,
“spoke from his heart” (undersecretary of state for political affairs Victoria
Nuland), and “is allowed to make his views known at any point he would like”
(White House press secretary Jen Psaki). This amounted to administration
officials patting the president on the head and telling people not to take
whatever he says too seriously.
(In this, Biden is continuing in the unfortunate
tradition established by Donald Trump of issuing readily ignored presidential
pronouncements.)
It’s not normal for a president to be such a tepid
performer that it’s very difficult for him to command a stage.
It’s not normal for a president to misspeak so routinely
that it almost seems strange when he gets it right.
It’s not normal for a president to shovel trillions of
dollars into a growing economy, and then still want to spend trillions more
when it’s clear that inflation is a real problem.
It’s not normal for a president to want to suppress U.S.
oil and gas production at the same time he begs OPEC to pump more.
It’s not normal for a president to open the floodgates
for illegal migration at the southern border and pretend that if he doesn’t
call the ensuing deluge a “crisis,” it somehow isn’t.
It’s not normal for a president to abandon his
long-standing support for the Senate filibuster to try to pass a no-hope
Democratic voting bill and warn of looming autocracy if the legislation doesn’t
pass.
It’s not normal (or shouldn’t be) for a president to
extend an eviction moratorium that he knows is illegal.
It’s not normal for a president to abandon Americans in a
foreign country after his withdrawal of U.S. forces, against the advice of his
generals, leads to a hostile force rapidly sweeping to power.
It’s not normal for a president’s son and brother to get
millions of dollars in easy money from a company that is a cat’s-paw of the
Chinese government.
It’s not normal for a first-term president to be on the
verge of becoming a lame duck because almost no one believes his assurances
that he’s going to run again (only 41 percent of Democrats in a recent Wall
Street Journal poll say they think Biden will run in 2024).
It’s a badly divided country at a time of growing threats
abroad and of declining faith in U.S. institutions. These are serious
challenges that it would take deft, farsighted presidential leadership to
overcome. Instead, what’s on offer isn’t even above-average presidential
leadership, and that’s not going to change.
For Joe Biden, this rocky, uninspired performance is
indeed the norm.
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