One year into his presidency, Biden hits a wall. Can he recover?
For Joe Biden, this was not how 2022 was supposed to start. On the timeline imagined by the White House when he took office a year ago, widely available vaccines would have effectively ended the Covid-19 pandemic in the US by now. The economy would be growing strongly, and a narrowly divided Congress would have already passed the bulk of Biden’s agenda. With those mega-missions accomplished, the president could have spent 2022 focusing on voting rights, cutting ribbons on infrastructure projects, and telling Americans what he had done to make their lives better — with vaccines, stimulus checks, and Great Society-scale investments in child care, education, and the fight against climate change.
It is just not, to put it mildly, how things have played out. Hard on the heels of the Delta variant, Omicron is now roiling the country. School closures and a shortage of tests are fuelling Americans’ frustration and despair. Meanwhile, Biden’s Build Back Better bill has stalled over the objections of West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, leaving the president’s agenda in a rut.
Also to contend with: soaring inflation numbers, the highest in 40 years; a simmering standoff with Russia as it masses troops on its border with Ukraine; and progressives’ fury at Biden over what they consider to be a late-to-the-game push for voting rights. Democratic allies say events have forced Biden’s White House into reactive mode. “It is hard to control the narrative when you have so many things coming at you, like climate change issues, tornadoes, Ukraine, wildfires destroying parts of the West, and omicron,” says former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a friend to many top White House aides. “I don’t know if they feel overwhelmed as much as they feel the gravity of these issues.”
The president’s approval ratings have slumped as he scrambles to show Americans he is doing all he can. Ipsos polling found that 50% of people disapprove of the way Biden is handling his job, while 45% approve, numbers roughly in line with the fall when the Delta variant was raging. A Gallup poll this month found that 40% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance while 56% disapprove — the 16-percentage-point gap is the largest of his presidency so far. “It’s disappointment after disappointment. It hasn’t stopped,” says Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican political operative who’s conducted several focus groups with independent voters in the past six months.
The latest is voting rights. Biden went to Georgia this month to promote voting rights legislation and advocate for changing Senate rules to pass it — only to find himself stymied again by Manchin and his fellow centrist Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Plus, Stacey Abrams, Democrats’ star organiser in Georgia and a staunch advocate of voting law reform, skipped Biden’s speech.
Democrats can point to a strong record in some areas. Biden passed the US$1.9 trillion ($3.56 trillion) American Rescue Plan, which sent child poverty plummeting and an infrastructure law with US$550 billion in new federal funds. The US job market has recovered more quickly than economists predicted — and far faster than it did from the global recession in 2009 when Biden was vice-president. America’s economy returned to pre-pandemic levels sooner than those of other Group of Seven nations. The Democrat-controlled Senate also confirmed 41 lower-court judges in Biden’s first year, the most for any first-year
president since John F. Kennedy. “I feel real good about the Biden administration. I wish we were, as a nation, in a better place,” says Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democratic congressman whose endorsement revived Biden’s primary campaign in 2020.
After four years of President Donald Trump in the White House, culminating in false claims of a stolen election and the Jan 6 insurrection, Americans looked to Biden to restore normalcy. But they are in a terrible mood because of the lingering pandemic and months of rising prices, a fact White House officials privately acknowledge. The question is whether the pandemic, inflation, supply chain glitches, and labour woes can be tamed and if that can happen in time for the 2022 elections. It is all Biden’s problem, regardless of whether it’s his fault.
The lesson of ‘the dog that didn’t bark’
The pandemic has largely shaped Biden’s fortunes so far. He emerged from the early months of his presidency hoping to put it behind him. Vaccinations had soared; caseloads had plunged. “We’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” he told the country in a speech on July 4. Although he cautioned: “That’s not to say the battle against Covid-19 is over. We’ve got a lot more work to do.”
Then the Delta variant erupted, ravaging the unvaccinated in particular. A huge number of people refusing vaccines wasn’t part of Biden’s plan. “I think that surprised him,” says Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a Biden friend.
As vaccinations lagged, the White House imposed mandates, fuelling Republican attacks. One mandate has since been blocked by the Supreme Court and another is in legal limbo — but not before millions more American adults got their shots.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has wavered on its guidance, particularly as officials weighed how to confront the highly transmissible but less deadly Omicron. This winter a run on tests and rolling school closures
have cast doubt on the administration’s preparedness and made it feel like the early months of 2020 all over again. Biden has responded by ordering a billion tests, though it’s not clear how quickly that will relieve shortages.
In addition to Covid’s human toll was its economic fallout. Jobs, household balance sheets, and gross domestic product data are better than expected, leaving the US with a 3.9% jobless rate. But inflation also has risen much more than Biden’s team ever expected and has lasted far longer, a massive political liability.
Biden and his aides were slow to show they understood the toll of inflation on the lives of Americans. “It took too long as a party to recognize the pain,” says Brian Stryker, a partner at ALG Research, of the Democrats. His polling firm ran a series of focus groups with Virginia voters after Democrats lost the gubernatorial race there last fall. Just calling inflation “transitory” was no longer cutting it, and the White House quietly stopped using that word over the summer.
In conversations with Biden’s aides, a sense of earnestness and righteousness is palpable, and indignation occasionally creeps in. In their view, the administration has a plan that’s be
ing executed competently, and the alternative is Republican-led mayhem and dysfunction. They believe the White House should receive more credit for the bright spots in the economy, especially the robust labour market and the falling unemployment rate.
Many Americans do not care about how much credit the White House thinks it deserves when people’s lives still feel upended. In politics, says New Jersey Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat, “you don’t often get credit for the dog that didn’t bark — the fact that the American economy didn’t collapse, the fact that we didn’t have poverty and destitution.”
Conversely, voters may measure Biden against the ambition of his own unfulfilled goals, a special liability for a president dealing with a 50-50 Senate. Theoretically, Biden has the votes to enact much of his agenda, but only with the slimmest of margins. And Manchin — who represents a state Trump carried in 2020 by a roughly 40-point margin — is happy to act as a check on the president’s aims and appears to enjoy the constant attention from White House officials and the press.
On the campaign trail, Biden touted his long experience in the Senate, sending the message that he knew how to move big plans through Congress. Now progressives blame him for decoupling the infrastructure bill from Build Back Better and losing a bargaining tool with moderates to pass the larger package, which hinges on the approval of Manchin, who baulked at the price tag.
“Biden ran as a dealmaker, and so far the only thing he’s done is deal any leverage he had,” says John Paul Mejia, a spokesman for the Sunrise Movement, a progressive climate group. “If Democrats show up to midterms with a message of ‘We tried, vote for us,’ they’re going to lose.”
Biden has pressed ahead with new climate targets and executive actions while writing regulations and waiting for the passage of BBB. He rejoined the Paris Agreement and almost doubled the US emissions reduction pledge under the pact, killed the Keystone XL pipeline, toughened auto emissions standards, stitched carbon considerations into a US trade pact for the first time, and more. Aides view this as easily the most robust climate record of any administration — and more ambitious than they’d have dreamed of even during the Obama era.
“Two things can be true at the same time: We can have a lot of work to do and have done a lot already,” says Ali Zaidi, a veteran of the Obama administration who serves as Biden’s deputy national climate adviser.
Shifting into attack mode and betting on omicron’s decline
Although he sought the presidency three times, Biden remains uneasy with some of its trappings. He is restless, aides say, in the fishbowl of the White House residence, with a staff that waits on him and the first lady. “I don’t get a chance to look people in the eye, because of both Covid and things that are happening in Washington,” he said at a Jan 19 press conference. He leaves Washington most weekends, heading either back to Delaware or, occasionally, to Camp David. “He would say we never give him any free time or any time to think,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki says. “And that is probably true.” To settle in, the Bidens recently got a puppy, Commander, and will soon get a cat.
The Biden White House is filled with family photos. On a table in the Oval Office, one of the president’s favourite cartoons is also displayed amid the smiling faces of relatives.
In the cartoon, a man shouts to the heavens, asking: “Why me?”
“Why not?” God shouts back.
Biden and Democrats are staring down a midterm election cycle that looks bruising. They are generally expected to lose the House, with New Jersey’s Malinowski among those facing tough fights for the waning number of competitive seats as state legislatures aggressively redraw maps. The Senate is also at risk, though Republicans are not having as much success as they would like in drafting strong candidates to run in key states.
Biden is optimistic he can turn things around and believes that good policy ultimately becomes good politics, aides say. “People don’t dislike him,” says Luntz, the Republican pollster. “His favourability is higher than his job approval rating, and that would allow him to come back.”
Biden’s core philosophy is that the way to win elections is to make a difference in people’s lives and deliver on promises, showing them how the federal government can make their lives better. To that end, he’ll try to revive Build Back Better by striking a deal with Manchin. He said on Jan 19 that the package would have to be broken up for parts of it to pass: “I’m confident we can get pieces, big chunks” signed into law, he said.
“The big question — the meta question — is, do people a few months out from Election Day feel like life is substantially or even marginally better than when Trump was president?” says Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn.org. “If they are murky or a definite ‘no,’ we have a problem. That comes down to policy,” she says, “but it comes down to how people feel” as well.
In the late fall, the White House began to pivot to more of a political attack mode. Biden’s team decided they needed to draw more direct contrasts with Trump personally and Republicans generally, aides say. That is something of a shift for a veteran senator who arrived in the Oval Office with a fundamental confidence in bipartisanship and a penchant for referring to Trump only as the “former president”. But he took aim at Trump on the anniversary of the Capitol riot and blasted Republican senators over voting rights, prompting a rebuke from Mitt Romney, among the most moderate members of his party. He’s also been quicker to blame Trump in the past few weeks for problems such as the deadlocked Iran nuclear talks.
At the recent press conference, Biden assailed the Republican Party for obstructionism. Asked about his first year in office, he replied, “I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done. Think about this: What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”
He added, “I don’t think I’ve overpromised at all, and I am going to stay on this track.”
Allies including Coons and Clyburn say they’re confident a slimmed-down version of Build Back Better will pass. To make it resonate with voters, though, they acknowledge that Team Biden and Democrats need to significantly ramp up their salesmanship. “We will do so much better to the extent we focus on a few concrete ways that what we’re doing helps middle-class Americans,” Coons says. “What I think didn’t work was talking about the numbers, and talking about a ‘massive bill’ or a ‘transformative bill.’ ”
Whatever happens with BBB, the administration will spend much of this year rolling out funding from the infrastructure law — which was supported by only a handful of House Republicans. “Every voter in the country needs to be reminded of that, again and again and again,” Malinowski says.
Biden aides acknowledge that the president is frustrated, in particular with the Covid testing shortage. “Joe Biden tends to take a long view on most things,” White House senior adviser Mike Donilon says. “I think he believes that there has been a foundation laid that has put the country in a good position going forward.”
A senior official maintains that the administration has painstakingly set the groundwork for further economic recovery and is ready to handle new flare-ups of Covid.
Privately, Biden aides are beginning to express cautious relief about omicron, which despite its spread is proving less deadly than first feared and is showing signs of having crested. One aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, says they feel good about where things stand, immediately adding that they know that sounds strange. But, in the aide’s view, a billion tests are coming and the supply of Pfizer Inc’s Covid pill is ramping up, while all the fundamentals — treatments, tests, vaccines, a strong economy — are in place to return to normal.
In November, as the economy’s growing pains coughed up good and bad news, politically, Coons says he consoled Biden: “I put my arm around him and said, ‘Mr President, a few months ago, the problem was we didn’t have enough jobs. Now, the problem is we don’t have enough workers. That’s a better problem to have.’,”
Some events could have turned things around for Biden, namely a fall in Covid cases, easing inflation, and a continued rebound of the economy. But there are wild cards, too. Inflation could continue to rise or stay high. Another Covid variant could emerge. Relations with Russia or China could take a worrying turn. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer could announce his retirement. Meanwhile, Trump looms in the background as the GOP kingmaker, both encouraging Republicans to stonewall Biden and offering himself as a helpful foil — and potential 2024 opponent.
If Democrats suffer in the midterms, as they did in 2010 under Obama, Biden’s options will be severely curtailed. The spotlight will then shift to another question, particularly as Trump gears up for his own potential bid: Will Biden seek reelection in 2024, a year when he’ll turn 82? If not, who could succeed him as the Democratic candidate?
Last month, Biden said he’d be guided by health, fate, and Trump himself. “I’m a great respecter of fate. Fate has intervened in my life many, many times,” Biden told ABC when asked if he would run. “If I’m in the health I’m in now, if I’m in good health, then in fact I would run again.” And if Trump ran? “You’re trying to tempt me now,” he said. —