Woe Is Biden

By Judson Berger

Friday, June 17, 2022

 

Who could have predicted the job of U.S. president would involve compounding challenges arising simultaneously on a global scale?

 

Not Biden, it seems, despite his prior eight years of intimate familiarity with the position. Based on press accounts and the president’s own public laments, he is dismayed at the following: bad hands he’s been dealt by the universe, the sheer number of problems he’s called upon to do something about, inadequate messaging from staff, aides who correct his gaffes, insufficiently positive media coverage, insufficiently supportive Democrats, those damn Republicans, and on it goes.

 

As is typical with those occupying high public office, nowhere on that list is evidence of self-reflection beyond the idea that he should have communicated better how incredible he is.

 

It is true, as pieces on this website have pointed out on occasion, that challenges ranging from the supply-chain mess to inflation are not primarily of the president’s making and involve forces outside his control (the Fed plays a bigger role in the latter and belatedly is trying to correct course). But it is not true that the buck stops everywhere but there.

 

Isaac Schorr, who moonlights as a Jolt writer, riffs on this theme here, and Kyle Smith provides a reality check:

 

Unpopular presidents tend to complain that they were dealt a bad hand, and then grouse that the media are making things look worse than they are. But Biden was dealt an excellent hand; he has no excuses for the mess he’s in. . . .

 

By the time Biden took office, the economy had rebounded energetically, growing 33.4 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively, in the last two quarters of 2020, and it was already roaring along at a 6.4 percent growth clip for the first quarter of 2021. Yet Biden pushed for more stimulus and got it, pouring $1.9 trillion worth of kerosene on the fire. And then he pushed for even more of the same, spending the rest of the year advocating trillions in infrastructure spending (which he got) and trillions more in spending on the so-called Build Back Better agenda (which he didn’t). Gasoline prices are not as directly linked to Biden’s actions as inflation, but he can hardly blame exogenous forces for the spike in the cost of fossil fuel when disrupting its supply has been a nakedly stated objective of the bureaucracy he put in place. . . .

 

Biden is the primary author of the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan that first caused his approval ratings to sag. His softness on illegal immigration is the obvious cause of the ongoing border crisis. And his inability to get through even a heavily stage-managed appearance without looking as clueless as Grandpa Simpson is the reason Americans doubt his fitness to lead.

 

On inflation, the Biden administration’s responses have been a tapestry of denial and misdirection and projection. The president often blames Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that prices were rising for months before the invasion of Ukraine. This week, Biden also blamed Republicans for — try and follow this — stopping him from tackling inflation by pumping more money into an overheated economy.

 

To that point, nowhere do we see an acknowledgment that big-spending policies at least could have played a role or that it might be wise to reconsider those policies in light of events. As Charles C. W. Cooke has noted, the modern Democratic agenda amounts to an “inflation machine,” including the goal to “increase the discretionary income of middle- and upper-middle-class Americans by writing at least $10,000 off the student-loan debt they owe taxpayers.”

 

Yet, what we hear is the world’s smallest violin playing “Wail for the Chief.”

 

A recent NBC News story captured this dynamic:

 

“I’ve heard him say recently that he used to say about President Obama’s tenure that everything landed on his desk but locusts, and now he understands how that feels,” a White House official said.

 

Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break.

 

From the New York Times comes the news that some Democratic insiders are starting to wonder whether they’d be better off cutting Biden loose in 2024. The piece, however, honors the conceit that a big part of the problem is his inability to pass “big-ticket legislation” and the “refusal” by congressional Democrats to “muscle through the president’s Build Back Better agenda or an expansion of voting rights.”

 

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showed inflation, the economy, gun violence, and abortion to be top issues for Americans, and Biden’s approval rating on the first was 28 percent.  Perhaps the president’s problem is not his inability to pass his panacean agenda but the growing realization that he doesn’t have one.