Biden: His report card for Year One

Democrats are reeling this week over the collapse of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, but this latest humiliation has “just put a bow on his mostly horrible first year in office.” Future historians can debate whether Biden’s “disastrous pullout from Afghanistan” was the biggest debacle, or the immigration policies that sparked “a border crisis to dwarf any we’ve seen.” Ordinary Americans might point to the alarming rise in inflation—soaring gas prices in particular—or a spike in violent crime, or Biden’s failure to “fix” the Covid-19 pandemic, a job he promised to make his top priority. Biden’s 41 percent approval rating is the lowest of his presidency, said The Economist in an editorial, but what should really terrify Democrats is the president’s “sliding popularity with the young.” When Biden took office in January, his net approval rating among voters under 30 was a gaudy plus 31 percent, the highest of any demographic bloc. Today, it’s minus 21 percent. Biden’s failure to make headway on voting rights, climate change, and student debt relief has so demoralized the younger, more progressive voters in the Democratic base that it “now threatens his presidency.”

What about the economy? said Matthew Winkler in Bloomberg .com. Despite inflation largely caused by global supply chain issues and booming demand, the economy as a whole “improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than under any president during the past 50 years.” A major reason for that was Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which slashed child poverty in half, boosted wages, and gave us projected growth this year of 5 to 6 percent— the highest since 1984. Unemployment fell to 4.2 percent amid the creation of 6 million new jobs, corporate profit percentages are the