WHY JOE BIDEN CAN’T MAKE DEMOCRATS HAPPY. News reports are filled with stories about growing Democratic unhappiness with President Joe Biden. It’s not just a little frustration. A lot of Democrats are really, really, really upset about Biden’s performance in the White House.
The short version is that not only has Biden fallen short of delivering on progressive dreams — truth be told, not a surprise to many progressives — but he has also failed to respond to the latest “unprecedented threat” that the right wing is said to pose to our democracy, or to a woman’s right to choose, or to gun safety, or to whatever. Biden, the thinking goes, is old and slow, overly deliberative, innately cautious, and mired in a barely functioning White House of his own making.
“Top Democrats complain the president isn’t acting with — or perhaps even capable of — the urgency the moment demands,” wrote CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere recently. “‘Rudderless, aimless and hopeless’ is how one member of Congress described the White House.”
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Dovere described the Biden White House as being caught flat-footed by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, even though the draft decision had been leaked weeks before. It was perhaps the least surprising decision ever released by the court — and yet the Biden team was surprised by it. “Several Democratic leaders privately mocked how the president stood in the foyer of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter as demonstrators poured into the streets,” Dovere wrote, “making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn’t decided on more.”
Fast-forward to this week and the July 4 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. “Biden’s response … seemed flat to many Democrats,” reported Politico’s Christopher Cadelago and Jonathan Lemire. They added: “‘He’s missing the boat here. This is our time to dig in and be absolutely furious because these half-measures are not working. He’s got a real excitability problem,’ said Camille Rivera, a Democratic strategist and partner at the progressive firm New Deal Strategies.” Politico and other publications unfavorably compared Biden’s understated response to the July 4 shooting with that of J.B. Pritzker, Illinois’s Democratic governor and a possible presidential candidate, who pronounced himself “furious” at the violence.
The big picture, according to these and other reports, is bleak for the president’s party. “In the view of many distraught Democrats, the country is facing a full-blown crisis on a range of fronts, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to respond with appropriate force,” wrote Ashley Parker and Matt Viser in the Washington Post. “Democracy is under attack, they say, as Republicans change election rules and the Supreme Court rapidly rewrites American law. Shootings are routine, a constitutional right to abortion has ended and Democrats could suffer big losses in the next election.”
So nearly everybody on the Democratic side is unhappy with the Democratic president. And here’s the thing: They will very likely remain unhappy with Biden, for reasons having more to do with themselves than with the president of the United States.
The Democrats’ most fundamental problem is that they entered the Biden administration with wildly unrealistic expectations. They expected to be able to get big things done, such as massive spending programs, far-reaching action on climate change, large tax increases, and more, without having won a majority of seats in the Senate. Indeed, there was talk, apparently serious, of Biden winning legislation on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society. And all this would be done with a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate, broken in the administration’s favor by the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
It was crazy. Back in 1993, the new President Bill Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary Clinton, to guide the administration’s top initiative, a national healthcare plan, through Congress. It was a huge undertaking that Hillary Clinton apparently thought she, with no experience holding public office, could bulldoze through Capitol Hill. A senior Democratic senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned her that she would need a big majority for legislation so far-reaching. Truly landmark bills don’t squeak through Congress with a single vote to spare, Moynihan reportedly told Clinton. “They pass 70-30, or they fail.”
Clinton ignored Moynihan, but Moynihan, of course, was right. Biden knew Moynihan. He served for decades in the Senate with him. And like Moynihan, Biden knew there was no way in the world that Democrats, if they were to try to craft huge bills on an entirely partisan basis, could pass country-changing legislation with just 50 votes. It is simply too hard to corral all 50 members of one team in one place when each has the power, like the power that, say, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has today, to scuttle legislation if his or her demands are not met.
So today’s Democrats expected way, way, way too much from their 50-seat non-majority in the Senate. But they also expected too much from the man they chose to be their party’s nominee for president. And then this: Perhaps more than actually accomplishing things, many Democratic voters want a president who will inspire them and make them feel good about themselves. They want a president who is a really great talker. Before Biden, there were just two Democratic presidents since Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. The two, Clinton and Barack Obama, were supremely gifted talkers.
Biden is not. To see that, just look at Biden’s halting performances after the mass shootings that have afflicted the country this year, and then look at what Obama did after incidents of terrible violence in Tucson, Arizona, Newtown, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina.
The country was shaken by those three events, in 2011, 2012, and 2015. In each, Obama played a role that was widely referred to at the time as “consoler in chief.” He traveled to each city and spoke at memorial services. He read from the Bible. He brought people to tears with his descriptions of the departed. He lightened the moment with a fond memory of those lost. He recognized heroes among the living. He touched people. And then he read more scripture. Finally, in Charleston, where racially motivated murders took place in a church, Obama actually broke into song, singing a verse of “Amazing Grace.”
They were extraordinary performances. Contrast that to Biden reacting to the Highland Park shooting. “We’ve got a lot more work to do,” the president said. “We’ve got to get this under control.” Could there have been a more pedestrian statement?
Biden cannot tell Democrats a story to make them feel better. He can’t sing them a song. He can’t deliver a homily to make them believe brighter times are on the way. He just can’t.
Here’s a footnote: Obama spoke beautifully, but he didn’t actually do anything about guns. He talked about passing big gun control legislation, but he didn’t make it happen. “Aides say he’s essentially given up on any significant gun control passing during his presidency,” Politico reported in December 2015.
Biden has actually gotten a gun control measure passed. No, it wasn’t big, but he gathered a bipartisan majority that overcame the Democrats’ weakness in the Senate and the body’s filibuster rules to pass a new gun control law. Biden can barely put two words together, but he did get something done on guns, which hasn’t happened in a long time.
It’s not enough for many Democrats. They want more. More than legislative progress, they crave a president who will tell them what they want to hear in a way that dazzles and excites them. Joe Biden is not that man — never was and never will be.
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