BIDEN’S VERY BAD YEAR
IS President Biden doing anything — and I mean anything — right? The news that his multitrillion-dollar swing for the historical fences, the Build Back Better bill, is being shelved just put a bow on his mostly horrible first year in office.
If Biden had a blackboard and drew a line down the middle with his achievements on one side and failures on the other, the positive list has maybe two things on it while the negative list is staggeringly long.
Negative: Inflation. Rising crime. More COVID deaths than in 2020. The mishandling of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. A border crisis to dwarf any we’ve seen. The ever-shifting line on school closures.
More in the negative column: Getting dinged by courts on efforts to continue a national eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control and on the national vaccine mandate. The disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. Bad off-year election results.
Positive: Early on he got a COVID relief bill. Later in the year he got an infrastructure bill. These were real legislative accomplishments, there’s no denying that. They sailed through the Scylla and Charybdis of hyperpartisanship and made it into law.
The problem for Biden is that it’s far too early to claim any results from infrastructure spending. The even greater issue is that the COVID relief may have created more problems than it solved.
Months and months of extraordinarily generous unemployment insurance had the unintended consequence of allowing millions to stay out of a workforce desperate for their return because the private sector couldn’t compete on price with . . . unemployment.
That kind of weird competitive pressure on the private sector from the public sector has also played a role in the supply-chain crises and the inflationary spiral. So his success here is also responsible for what may be the most damaging policy failure of his presidency so far.
The last time Washington gave off these particular vibes — an out-of-control economy with topdown policy solutions that only made things worse and a depressed and withdrawn foreign policy that only emboldened our adversaries — I had a full Jewfro atop my head and was watching “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” at home on Saturday nights because I couldn’t get a date to go to the disco with me.
I’m getting old, is what I’m saying, and “West Side Story” isn’t the only convincing remake I’ve seen. All this hearkens directly back to 1979-1981, the late Carter years and the peculiar emotional combination of confusion, powerlessness and rage that seemed to emanate from the liberal ruling class when its off-the-shelf answers to pressing questions just didn’t assure anyone that they knew what they were doing.
Biden’s championing of a bill initially designed to spend $6 trillion ate up his party’s legislative attention for nearly six months. Build Back Better declined in size but never ascended in approval, no matter the propagandistic efforts to claim its provisions were popular — just so long as nobody was asked how much the provisions they liked would actually cost.
It doesn’t really matter why Biden went down this stupid path. It doesn’t matter whether he had an idea about solidifying his party’s progressive base in the way Donald Trump solidified his party’s conservative base. Or maybe it was because third-rate newsmagazine historians and bestselling pop biography toadies came to the White House sucking their “PBS NewsHour” thumbs and swelling his head with comparisons to FDR and LBJ and whatever other three-initialed liberal gods they might have invoked to cloud what little reason Biden might have left.
What matters is the results. He didn’t “fix” COVID. The country is experiencing inflation at a level 170 million people in this country (all those under the age of 40) have never lived through before. Cities are returning to the state of nature. And Biden’s party is going to have to go out there next year and see whether it can do anything to stave off the tsunami that will sweep it away 11 months from now on midterm Election Day.