The Washington Post and Politico both published retrospectives on President Joe Biden’s first year in office on Wednesday, and they both are built around a similar storyline: Biden started his term off strong, then came the collapse of Afghanistan in August, then delta, then omicron, and rising inflation to boot.
Politico writes: “The administration tried to pitch each development as a testament of their mettle — they’d ended the nation’s longest war and were confronting the virus. But for a president that had made competency central to his message to the American public, the pair of missteps was politically damaging. His poll numbers have yet to recover.”
The Washington Post echoes: “Biden presented himself as an antidote to his predecessor, offering the promise of what his own campaign ads called ‘strong, steady, stable leadership’ after four years of bedlam under President Donald Trump. But the tumult surrounding the administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan offered an early glimpse of the cascade of crises that have badly eroded Biden’s image of restoring calm.”
Was Afghanistan, which didn’t happen until August, really “an early glimpse” of Biden’s failures?
Not at all.
It was clear almost immediately that Biden’s first-day executive orders to suspend all interior deportations and end President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy were epic policy disasters.
By March, CNN was running stories titled “How the border problem caught the Biden team off guard, and how they’ve scrambled to fix it.” That same month, the Washington Post published an item titled “Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge.”
Since then, the border chaos has only gotten worse. It is only in the last month that “inflation” has overtaken “immigration” as the issue Biden gets his highest disapproval numbers on.
And the border crisis really is the best issue to explain the complete failure of the rest of Biden’s agenda. Rather than govern as a competent centrist, Biden has been pushed by the activists in his party to implement highly ideological policies with no basis in reality. Democrats have moved to the left on immigration further and faster than on any other issue. Their calls to “abolish ICE” and decriminalize illegal border crossings are radically out of step with the public. Yet Biden plowed ahead and tried to make these activists happy.
Anybody with even an ounce of common sense could tell you these policies wouldn’t work. Just ask Texas Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who said earlier this year, “When you create a system that incentivizes people to come across, and they are released, that immediately sends a message to Central America that if you come across, you can stay. It incentivizes droves of people to come, and the only way to slow it down is by changing policy at our doorstep. If they don’t change the policy, the flow of continued migration traffic isn’t going to stop or slow down.”
Biden hasn’t changed policy on the border. And he won’t. He can’t. Democrats such as Gonzalez who live in border communities and understand this issue are far outnumbered and outspent by far-left immigration activists here in Washington.
Until that changes, Biden’s incompetence will only continue.
