By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
Every dog has his day, and apparently
so does every miserably inadequate president.
Joe Biden, who has been out of touch,
tone-deaf, and disturbingly incompetent from the outset of his presidency,
suddenly has the “Big Mojo,” or at least the “Moderate-Sized
This-Isn’t-Quite-the Legislative-Debacle-We-Expected Mojo.”
The climate and health-care-spending deal
forged by Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and longtime Democratic holdout
Joe Manchin has revived talk in the media and among Democrats of Biden’s
transformative agenda — if not quite FDR- or LBJ-level, substantial and to be
reckoned with.
There’s no doubt that Biden has spent a
lot of money between the so-called $1.9 trillion Covid-relief package and now
the $700 billion in the latest bill.
It’s also true that winning is better than
losing, success is better than futility, and passing something is better than
nothing.
The Schumer-Manchin bill, though, is a
shadow of the original sprawling proposal that constituted nearly the entire
progressive wish list, from free community college to universal pre-K to
expanded parental leave, stuffed into one legislative casing.
The scaled-back version is a not
particularly coherent combination of whatever Joe Manchin and his fellow
resistant Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, were willing to support.
Its claim to reduce inflation is a joke;
its deficit reduction is backloaded and has already been vitiated by other
unpaid-for spending; its taxes will hit Americans earning less than $400,000 a
year, despite Biden’s promises; its electric-car subsidies are frustrated by
its own requirements that key components not come from China — requirements
that no car can currently meet.
The bill doesn’t remove any of the doubts
about Biden, whose main contribution to the process of cutting the deal was to
stay out of the way.
Otherwise, the president still hasn’t
successfully made the public case for anything. Indeed, he has almost zero
capacity for persuasion — something that the White House clearly realizes and
that’s reflected in his limited schedule and interactions with the press.
He’s allowed the Left to lead him around
by the nose on most things, mouthing its lines about the Georgia voting law
supposedly being “Jim Crow on steroids” and slamming the Supreme Court while he
was on a trip overseas.
His agenda has been almost entirely removed
from the concerns of ordinary Americans. The title of the new spending bill is
a nod to inflation, but what it really offers Americans groaning under
double-digit price increases in key goods is — just what they need — more solar
panels and wind turbines.
Of course, Biden’s first big achievement,
the Covid bill, turned out to be most consequential for what it did to stoke an
inflation that has disrupted the lives of much of the country and eroded its
standard of living.
It is this failure, more than the border
or Afghanistan, that has sent Biden below 40 percent approval in most polls.
It’s one thing to sag in popularity before a midterm election — that’s normal.
It’s quite another to convince almost everyone in the country, including
members of your own party, that you are unsuited to running for president
again.
Only 18 percent of Americans in the latest
Yahoo News/YouGov poll say that Biden should run for a second term. Just 29
percent of Biden voters are ready for him to suit up and ride
again in 2024, an astonishing repudiation from people who presumably wish him
well and were hoping for the best.
Well, at least Biden, the oldest man ever
to serve as president, set up his succession with foresight and care, right?
Naturally, only 30 percent of Democrats and Democratic independents want Vice
President Kamala Harris to be the nominee in 2024.
Perhaps it makes Biden’s legislative
achievements all the more impressive that he’s been able to manage them while
simultaneously cratering. If that’s a distinction of sorts, it’s not one any
president should welcome.
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