Joe Biden Has Gotten Terrible Advice

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 06, 2023

 

The level of anxiety settling over the Democratic political landscape could be measured in the frenetic reaction to the weekend’s polls from within quarters friendly toward the Biden White House.

 

Sure, the New York Times confessed, the Siena College survey the Times sponsored finds Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by a healthy margin in five of the six swing states it covered. But a supplemental analysis elsewhere in the paper argued that, while Trump’s criminal indictments have yet to undermine his political position, “around 6 percent of voters” in those six swing states said that “if the former president is convicted and sentenced . . . they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden.”

 

Biden’s weakness among young voters in particular today is unlikely to translate into affirmative support for Trump next year, writes Times analyst David Leonhardt. Biden’s age may be a political disadvantage, but Trump’s own advanced years may neutralize the problem in voters’ eyes. And there’s always “the Roe factor,” which Democrats expect will convince their party’s likeliest voters to get over their misgivings about Biden. But the Times survey suggests that a contest between dueling personalities or one that is dominated by divisive social issues is one Biden will lose. Across all six states, voters, by two-to-one margins, said their vote would be determined by “economic issues” like “jobs, taxes, or the cost of living” rather “societal issues.”

 

A CBS News/YouGov poll of likely voters published Sunday cements the impression that Biden’s troubles are rooted in Democrats’ policy preferences and cannot be swiftly remedied. Whereas only 18 percent of respondents said a second term for Biden would leave them “financially better off,” 45 percent said the same of Trump. Just 31 percent told pollsters a Biden victory would “increase peace and stability” overseas whereas 47 percent said the same about a second term for Trump. Voters dealt Democrats a gut punch when a near-majority (49 percent) told YouGov pollsters that Trump would be more likely to preside over a colorblind administration than Biden.

 

All told, it’s not hard to see why 51 percent of voters in CBS’s poll said they’d back Trump in November 2024 versus Biden’s 48 percent. But not to worry, said CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes in relating the alleged thinking among Biden operatives. “They insist that this is not alarming,” she observed. “They said that former president Obama was trailing in some polls one year out from his own reelection day as well, and things turned out just fine.”

 

However brave a face they try to put on in their public communications, it’s a safe bet that Biden staffers do find these dire poll numbers “alarming.” But it is their mess: Biden wouldn’t be in this position if he hadn’t let his closest confidants talk him into capitalizing on the Trumpified GOP’s surprising weaknesses in the most imprudent ways.

 

It’s certainly possible that Biden never meant a word of it when he described himself as a “transition candidate” and promised his presidency would serve as a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. It’s not inconceivable that Biden’s political team saw a middling talent like Kamala Harris not as insurance against an attempt to usher the president off the political stage but as a worthy successor. But if Biden’s allies were engaged in a confidence game, it sure fooled its marks. “It is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president,” Politico declared in 2019. Indeed, the sense that Biden would be a one-term caretaker president was reinforced by the 2020 election results, in which voters extracted Trump from the White House with surgical precision while leaving much of the GOP not just intact but stronger. Biden’s progressive critics spent the rest of 2020 bemoaning a dreadful stalemate that would compel him to govern like the moderate he pretended to be.

 

But when Republican candidates lost both Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early 2021, the GOP’s weaknesses were finally revealed to Biden’s coterie of flatterers. With the Congress now in Democratic hands, Biden took a languid meeting (“I could have gone another two hours,” Biden reportedly told an aide) with a group of high-profile historians who reportedly urged the new president to reach for the stars. Biden was said to be receptive. As Axios’s Mike Allen observed of Biden’s response to Doris Kearns Goodwins’s probing solicitations, “I’m no FDR, but. . . .”

 

Biden didn’t govern in quite the Rooseveltian or Johnsonite ways his admirers may have hoped. Worse, he governed like Joe Biden. The president sought and secured a nearly $2 trillion “Covid-relief plan” that represented the “biggest investment” in Democratic social priorities since World War II. He pursued another $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan designed to shore up “racial justice,” the “care economy,” “learning environments,” “adult literacy,” and “labor protections.” And he tried for another $3.5 trillion comprehensive progressive-social-engineering bill retailed under the “Build Back Better” banner. He managed to convince his fellow Democrats to pass only some of the spending that some intrepid analysts warned, correctly, would have an inflationary effect. But Biden’s allies wanted the president to go big, and big — for good or ill — is exactly what they got.

 

Biden entered office convinced by the activist class of the need to “heal the damage” the Trump administration had done to America’s self-conception with his tough border policies, but the president was persuaded to stay this rocky course by the ideologues in his orbit. The internal arguments over how to police the border swiftly evolved into arguments over how to house and provide for new arrivals, and the voices that argued for tougher policies toward asylum seekers were shouted down. Biden has subsequently presided over what Customs and Border Protection figures suggest is the worst border crisis in American history.

 

Biden took the oath of office determined to end American involvement in Afghanistan, and he did so in the most shambolic way imaginable. But the president’s instinct to play peacemaker also led Biden to ease sanctions targeting Russian and Iranian interests in his first year. Biden rewarded Putin’s aggressive posturing on Ukraine’s borders in 2021 with a face-to-face summit — a gesture the Kremlin reciprocated by inaugurating the worst land war in Europe since 1945 just months later. The Iran-backed October 7 massacre of Israelis was planned to coincide with Passover, the Jerusalem Post reported this week. But Israeli interrogations of captured Hamas terrorists indicate that the raid might have been “delayed due to informal negotiations with the United States which led to $6 billion being freed up for Iran in September.”

 

In 2022, when terrible candidate selection led the GOP to sacrifice an election year whose fundamentals were favorable to it, Biden once again internalized a variety of erroneous conclusions about the political environment. “His advisers sound almost giddy, using words like ‘miracle’ and ‘biblical’ to describe the election,” Times reporter Peter Baker related. One Biden advisor “called the president ‘beyond confident’ and compared the midterm victory to somehow managing to escape the slaughter of the Battle of Little Bighorn.” Biden’s team went to work mapping out “what a 2024 campaign would look like,” mistaking the bullet Democrats had somehow dodged for a demonstration of the party’s dexterity.

 

Maybe Biden was talked out of being someone he is not. Maybe his advisors merely indulged Biden’s instincts. Either way, the president did not govern like a placeholder president with no discernable mandate. He shot for the moon. The results of his ambition are a world on fire, an economy defined by unacceptably high consumer costs, and a pervasive sense of insecurity among those who walk America’s streets.

 

All this hubris now haunts the president’s party. Today, Biden is staring down the barrel of a historic humiliation — the prospect of a loss to a one-term president who left office in disgrace and may be forced to campaign for the White House again with a felony conviction to his name. By all accounts, the president has been privy to a lot of bad advice. If the idea that Trump’s unsuitability will save this White House from a legacy-staining rebuke has any purchase with Biden, we must conclude that Biden is still in the market for more of the same.