President Joe Biden moved swiftly to combat the omicron variant as the nagging coronavirus pandemic presented fresh political challenges for his embattled administration.
Biden detailed travel restrictions from southern Africa, the origin region of the variant, while urging the public to get vaccinated and wear protective face masks.
“We’re throwing everything we can at this virus,” Biden said Monday in remarks to reporters from the White House. But the emergence of a new coronavirus strain at the outset of the holiday season is yet another obstacle for the president to navigate amid a minefield of lingering political problems.
“People want to go back to normal and let go of the anxiety” from the pandemic, said Sarah Longwell, a Never Trump Republican political operative who has been conducting focus groups with swing voters, Biden voters, and voters who supported former President Donald Trump in 2020. “The longer it hangs around, it creates a sense among voters that things are not going well.”
Some Democratic operatives are predicting at least equal political peril for Republicans should omicron dominate the winter months of early 2022. They have generally opposed key steps Biden has taken to dampen the pandemic.
“Republicans are doing everything they can to make it harder to stop COVID and then doing everything they can to blame Joe Biden for the result,” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson said. “People will see through it when the arsonists try to blame the fire department.”
Biden’s job approval rating has plunged to near 40%, with the president reeling from his handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, skyrocketing inflation and attendant economic concerns, and the persistence of the coronavirus. The rise of omicron in South Africa last week comes on the heels of a delta variant that disrupted life in the United States throughout the spring, summer, and early fall.
It’s the latest development to bedevil Biden’s effort to “shut down the virus,” as he promised to do while campaigning for president the previous fall.
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Voters were broadly disappointed with Trump’s handling of the pandemic, electing Biden hoping for a better result. Forced to choose between the two, they may indeed prefer the current president’s approach to the coronavirus over his predecessor’s. But the continued threat of infection and corresponding economic uncertainty despite the proliferation of the vaccine is taking a major political toll on Biden.
“He got elected on a promise to get the pandemic under control,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, who explained that the president’s initial high job approval numbers were the result of optimism generated by the availability of the vaccine plus declining infection rates. “The delta wave and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] backtracking on masks was the catalyst for Biden’s numbers to start falling, not Afghanistan.”
“The longer he doesn’t deliver,” Ruffini added, “the worse it gets for him.”
Biden’s problem is not just the criticism he is enduring from the GOP, as illustrated by a statement issued by the Republican National Committee Monday that sounds as though it could have been used by the Democratic National Committee against Trump last year. “Biden has refused to accept responsibility for his failed leadership, lost all credibility, and continues to shift blame and further divide the American people,” RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn said.
The president is also under fire from elements of the liberal base of the Democratic Party. Biden has implemented a constitutionally questionable federal vaccine mandate and continues to advocate social distancing and the wearing of face masks. But some liberal activists complain he is not being aggressive enough with measures to protect people from the dangers posed by the coronavirus.
On Monday, Biden said he was treating the omicron hazard seriously and listening to the advice of the administration’s science and medical experts.
But the president signaled he had no intention of revisiting government regulations that would restrict economic activity or social gatherings that characterized most of the first 18 months of the pandemic. “Look, I’m sparing no effort at removing roadblocks to keep the American people safe,” he said. “But if people are vaccinated and wear their mask, there is no need for a lockdown.”
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Democratic operatives concede the prolonged pandemic is bad news for Biden. By extension, the same is true for vulnerable Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections. However, some Democrats believe omicron could provide Biden an opportunity to reassert his leadership and remind swing voters and independents why they found him appealing when they voted for him last November.
“It is both a test and an opportunity for Democrats,” a Democratic strategist said. “We ran on hitting Trump for his inability to manage the pandemic, and so this is an opportunity for Joe Biden to show how he would do things differently and prevent something from getting out of control — should this variant pose a problem.”
Christian Datoc contributed to this report.
