“Rudderless, aimless, and hopeless” is how one congressional Democrat described the White House to CNN. WashWashington Postington Post and Politico quickly followed, each outlet publishing long stories filled with quotes from Democrats trashing President Joe Biden’s administration.
“There is a leadership vacuum right now and he’s not filling it,” said Adam Jentleson, a former adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), to the Washington Post.
“He’s missing the boat here. This is our time to dig in and be absolutely furious because one-half measures are not working. He’s got a real excitability problem,” New Deal Strategies partner Camille Rivera told Politico.
Biden has never enjoyed support from Republicans, and his support among independents cratered soon after he promised a peaceful withdrawal from Afghanistan that became a historic catastrophe.
But a string of new failures, capped off by a weak response to the Supreme Court’s completely foreseeable overturning of Roe v. Wade, has Democrats running to the press with calls for a change in leadership atop the party.
“In the view of many distraught Democrats,” the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Matt Viser write, “the country is in full-blown crisis on a range of fronts, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to respond with appropriate force. Democracy is under attack, they say, as Republicans change election rules and the Supreme Court rapidly rewrites American law. Shootings are routine, abortion rights have ended, and Democrats could suffer big losses next election.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones who feel the country is in crisis. A recent Monmouth University poll found that a record-high 88% of respondents — including 92% of Republicans, 91% of independents, and 80% of Democrats — believe “things in the country have gotten off on the wrong track.”
Unlike Democrats, however, most people aren’t freaking out about fake issues like the supposed end of democracy. They are worried about inflation and gas prices, two issues on which the vast majority know that Biden’s policies have made lives worse.
Some Democrats, however, are not ready to throw Biden under the bus quite yet. “He’s the president of the United States, he’s the leader of our party. He defeated Donald Trump,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a likely replacement for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), told the Washington Post. “There’s a tone in which to challenge the administration and offer new ideas, and that tone ought to be one of good faith to help the president, not throwing darts to weaken him when he’s the leader of our party.”
If Biden remains this unpopular by this time next year, expect less loyalty from Democrats like Khanna and more refusals to support Biden, which are already coming from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
“What the president and the Democratic Party needs to come to terms with is that this is not just a crisis of Roe, this is a crisis of democracy,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “This is a crisis of legitimacy, and President Biden must address that.” Later that same day, Ocasio-Cortez refused to endorse a 2024 Biden run.
