Biden hasn’t changed, but what we demand of him has

Joe Biden’s poll numbers keep sliding.

Americans, including many of the people who voted for him, are not happy with him. They want him to be something different, to be someone different.

Some may think that these Americans misjudged the man they sent to the White House. I don’t share that view.

America didn’t misjudge Joe Biden. As president, he has been exactly who he said he’d be. But America did misjudge the kind of leader it wanted in this moment.

Last year, most Democrats had a single goal: to get rid of Donald Trump. He was degrading the country and possibly destroying it.

We were all living in a vortex of chaos. Every morning we rose to a fresh hell. What had he done and said today? It felt at times like we were trapped in an abusive relationship. We just wanted out.

Biden seemed, to many, to be the man who could provide it, the man who could loosen Trump’s stranglehold on our society. Democrats were afraid to take too much of a chance with their nominee. Wanting too much, let alone demanding it, felt dangerous.

So we settled on the elder statesman. The straight white man. The middle-ofthe-roader: not too hot, not too cold, lukewarm.

He was the “scrappy kid from Scranton,” the unapologetic “union man” who could win back the pixies of politics: the working-class white voters who could back Barack Obama in one election and Trump in the next.

Biden pitched electability — moderation rather than transformation — and voters liked it.

When he took office, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, who had chaired his campaign, told The Times that the president was projecting a sense of “calm resolve.”

Calm resolve may well be the working mantra of the Biden administration — and there have been successes and positive news under Biden — but Americans are now dealing with a virus that won’t go away, rising inflation, progressive legislation that is either stalled (like the Build Back Better bill) or abandoned (like Sen. Cory Booker’s federal police reform bill).

A congressional committee is looking into the Jan. 6 insurrection, and prosecutors around the country are looking into Trump, his campaign, his family and his companies, but he has yet to be held accountable for his multiple transgressions and is likely to run again in 2024.

The Biden administration needs a pinch of cayenne.

They thought that if they just kept their heads down and did the work, they would be rewarded. But that’s not the way the world works anymore, not in this moment, not after Trump.

If you put a megaphone down, someone else will pick it up. Silence creates a void aching to be filled.

As Politico reported in October, Biden had participated in just 10 one-on-one interviews in the first nine months of his presidency.

Biden wasn’t always so reticent. As Politico noted, he was far more outspoken as vice president.

There is a hardening perception that the president isn’t even being silently productive, but voiceless and vacant.

Biden is being the president he campaigned to be. But conditions on the ground have changed. What the American people want from their leader has changed. And Biden is going to have to change with them.

He has to be the president America needs today, not the one it needed in December 2020.