Nothing is Joe Biden’s fault
“Democrats frustrated with Biden” is the new “Dems in disarray.”
In the last few days, one news outlet after another has published articles on Democratic displeasure with President Joe Biden and his White House. When that kind of dissatisfaction emerges, it can generate its own momentum.
The discontent is coming not just from the left, but from all parts of the party. The complaints call Biden too passive, too reactive, too slow, too wedded to outdated conceptions of how politics works, and unwilling to take the fight to Republicans. Many critiques are fair, some less so, but all are driven by the reality of a president with low approval ratings and a party headed for a difficult midterm election.
Much of what ails Biden is beyond his control, and presidents with more political talent than him faced similar struggles. But he also may be uniquely ill-suited to turn things around. Biden was the right candidate to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, but what if he’s the wrong president for the challenges of 2022?
If we look back over Biden’s career, we see someone with real but finite strengths, who was sometimes the right man at the right moment, and sometimes just the opposite.
He ran two abysmal presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008, then Barack Obama picked an older White insider to balance his ticket, a wise choice. Biden turned out to be a very good vice president (not that anyone noticed), and in 2020, despite running another campaign that could generously be described as mediocre, much of the Democratic primary electorate decided that the older, reassuring, avuncular White guy was the best candidate to get rid of Trump.
That turned out to be a smart decision. And from the time he became the presumptive nominee, Biden did an excellent job of bringing the left into the fold, creating policy working groups with representatives of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and making his own proposals more progressive.
But today, he seems surprised by the new radicalism of the Republican Party and unable to craft a response to it, nor to the extraordinary aggressiveness of the Supreme Court. Since he is by nature an institutionalist, his first impulse when asked about the filibuster or reforming the court is to resist fundamental change, which to his supporters sounds like naivete and defeatism.
That’s before you even get to the things over which he has only the tiniest measure of control, including the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, gas prices and inflation.
Let’s grant that it’s likely that no president would be popular at a moment like this one. We tend to overestimate the president’s ability to turn any situation to his advantage with well-chosen words and a steely gaze.
In fact, other recent presidents’ approval ratings at this stage of their presidencies look very similar to Biden’s. In Gallup polling, Biden is at 41%. At the same point in Trump’s term, he was at a nearly identical 42%. Barack Obama did a bit better, at 47%. Bill Clinton was at 44% (George W. Bush was an outlier because of 9/11).
Obama and Clinton were far more charismatic and politically skilled than Biden, yet their approval at this point wasn’t that different from his. Obama had signed more significant pieces of legislation, but like Clinton, he had much larger Democratic majorities in Congress helping him.