Joe Biden entered the Oval Office with a clear mandate for his presidency — to make America normal again. But he also came to power with the political and practical tools to do so. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, Biden had three vaccines, all successful at neutralizing the risk of hospitalization and death from the pandemic. He also had a razor-thin partisan margin in Congress — not enough to transform America, but enough to govern according to the consensus as he had promised during his campaign.
Yet a full year after entering office with nearly a 20-point net approval rating, Biden has squandered all the goodwill with which he entered office. His average approval rating has hit an all-time nadir of barely 40 points. At this point in his presidency, only Donald Trump, himself the most statistically unpopular president of the post-war era, had reached a lower point.
The reason is simple enough: Instead of fulfilling his simple promise to end the pandemic, he shifted the goal posts to prolong it. Rather than neutralizing the partisanship of the Trump era, he has exacerbated it, fueling it to a point of no return.
Biden had been bombastic in his Senate years. But after the tragic death of his son Beau and the hostility of the Trump years, he remodeled himself as an elder statesman. He campaigned as someone less ideological, interested in bringing back empathy to our culture and stability to our politics. With Trump off Twitter and Democrats only nominally in charge of Congress, Biden simply had to let the vaccines do their thing and then do no harm. Easy.
Only he has failed, and miserably. The bottom really began to fall out with Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left behind thousands of Americans and allies while getting troops slain in the process.
But the two crucial mistakes were closer to home.
On the coronavirus front, Biden didn’t just fail; he broke his most explicit promise. Nobody seriously expected him to end the pandemic, in the purely medical sense of the term, but everyone expected him to end its social and economic consequences. By maintaining the pre-vaccine consensus that regulations must remain to minimize the number of coronavirus cases rather than hospitalizations or deaths, he refused to let that progress happen. What was actually a problem of people refusing to get vaccinated came to look like something much worse. And Biden inadvertently deprived himself of his greatest weapon to bolster public opinion. Conservatives (and some liberal feminists, for that matter) may mock Biden for his incessant back rubs and hair sniffing, but Biden is a tactile politician, one who, at least once upon a time, exuded his greatest asset — empathy — through the sort of touch and talk he cannot employ from behind an N95.
In the long run, the damage Biden did to the economy has proven even more unforced and more damaging.
Biden does indeed deserve a significant amount of the blame for the current inflation. Democratic economists such as Larry Summers spent months warning Biden that his robust fiscal policies risked catalyzing inflation. In fact, the Federal Reserve’s commitment to more than a decade of near-zero interest rates and heightened quantitative easing during the pandemic had just as much of an effect.
Biden’s real sin has been suffocating supply by extending increased unemployment payments and imposing further coronavirus and climate regulations. At least in terms of supply problems, things are arguably worse today than they were in April 2020, at the height of the pandemic recession.
Trump was not popular. He failed to curb long-term risks, such as our catastrophic national debt projection. But the general public liked Trump’s America, a fact reflected in the nation’s record financial prospects and satisfaction in their personal lives prior to the pandemic.
A further case in point: While Trump plumbed new depths in terms of presidential approval, voter satisfaction about the direction of the country as a whole was reached its highest point during his presidency since the beginning of the George W. Bush administration.
So what did Biden have to do? Just let people return to the status quo of 2019, sans Trump. He couldn’t even do that.
A year later, despite a massively successful vaccine rollout, Biden’s team of COVIDiots are now putting children behind surgical masks when his union allies aren’t locking them out of classrooms altogether. Workers’ paychecks are now covering fewer of the goods that manage to make it to markets amid mass labor and supply shortages.
Luckily, Biden has not been able to do too much damage lately, given that his attention has been focused on a dead-on-arrival bill to federalize elections. And in case you want an extra dose of that empathy and unity, he’ll liken you to George Wallace and Jim Crow should you have the audacity to oppose him.
