Biden’s faceplant

The emerging conventional wisdom, at least among conservatives and moderates and even some increasingly nervous liberals, is that Joe Biden has sabotaged his presidency by pursuing a radical-left agenda that most Americans recoil from.

That conventional wisdom is probably correct, but doesn’t go nearly far enough: It isn’t just the nature of Biden’s agenda that is the problem but also that he felt compelled to have one in the first place, thereby forgetting the reasons he is president.

Biden won the Democratic nomination last year only because his party didn’t want self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders to win it. He then won the presidency only because a sufficient number of voters had reached their chaos limit and wanted Donald Trump out of it.

In neither case did it have much to do with Joe; he was merely an instrument of avoidance (Bernie) and then removal (Trump). All he had to do was stand there and not be Sanders or Trump.

Biden was elected to restore civility and decorum and turn down the heat and not much else, which also means that he should have focused from the outset on doing less rather than more; indeed, doing as little as possible (before even accounting for the Democrats’ razor-thin margins in Congress).

The public didn’t want spending blowouts that drive up inflation and add to an already potentially catastrophic national debt. They also didn’t want an assault upon domestic energy producers they are reminded of whenever they fill up at the pump and get the gas bill in the mail.

Nor did they vote for critical race theory in their kids’ schools, for “equity” campaigns that threaten to turn the nation into a racial-preference spoils system or for sweeping, costly climate-change proposals that seek to address something that doesn’t even show up on their issue radar.

On covid, there was no need for federal vaccine mandates that threaten to further tank the economy and politicize the pandemic (and are likely unconstitutional to boot) or for Biden to repeal everything Trump had done just because Trump did it (including border policies that had effectively taken the immigration issue off the front-burner, to where Biden has now returned it).

When it came to foreign policy, Biden could have smoothed relations with allies that Trump had undermined, made a few perfunctory “get tough” noises about Putin and the ChiComs and then left well enough alone. There was definitely no reason to remind Americans that a place called Afghanistan still existed by ignoring the advice of his generals and precipitating the most humiliating foreign policy debacle in decades there.

As for the loyal opposition, Biden could have avoided hysterical attacks upon popular voting-reform laws (“Jim Crow on steroids”) and fights with popular Republican governors (like Florida’s Ron DeSantis) who seek to become more popular still by fighting with him.

He could have instead stayed at least somewhat above the hyper-polarized fray and allowed Trump to continue to wreck himself and the GOP all on his own, because no one does it better (to wit, his recent call for Republicans to not vote in this year’s elections — if you’re a Democrat, how can you do better than that?).

Biden really didn’t need major initiatives of any kind; to the contrary, the stage was nicely set to play the kind of low-key “small ball” that Bill Clinton perfected to salvage his presidency.

Biden would have been doing just fine by this point if he had ignored the nutty woke left of his party (which the public also thinks is nutty, and which has, in any event, nowhere else to go) and just blathered on about unity and healing, with an occasional “come on, man” and “malarkey” thrown in for hokey effect.

After hiding out in the basement during the campaign, he could have found the White House basement even more comfy.

Above all, Biden had to only remember the slogan of the administration in which he once faithfully served — “don’t do stupid s - - -!!” Instead, “stupid s - - -!!” is about the only thing he has done.

Complaints that Biden will become a “shrinking president” if he doesn’t get this or that ambitious piece of his agenda enacted miss the point that a shrinking president is precisely what we needed after enduring perhaps the most outsized one in our national experience.

What exhausted voters wanted and thought they were getting last November was a “return to normalcy,” not a radical-left transformation of their nation.

Four volatile years of rancor and polarization followed by pandemic upheavals cautioned against proposals guaranteed to produce more rancor, polarization, and upheaval, but that is the course Biden chose — almost nothing that he has done had to be done, or done in the way he did it, thereby piling unforced error upon unforced error.

All of which means that we are going to be spending lots of time trying to figure out why the dragon-slayer tried to become the radical transformer.

More specifically, why a supposedly experienced “Washington hand” who was elected to the Senate before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency so badly misread the mood of the nation and consequently botched just about everything he touched.