Biden’s 500-day scorecard hardly looks like a winner
Come next Friday, the 500th day of his presidency, Joe Biden, gazing from the Oval Office toward flags surrounding the Washington Monument, might or might not think: Sadly, the flags still have only 50 stars, not 52 or even 51. Statehood for the District of Columbia, and even for Puerto Rico, were, it is difficult to remember, important progressive aspirations long ago, when Biden’s presidency was young.
These measures were to be made possible by ending the Senate filibuster. This would also make possible the federal seizure from the states of the constitutional responsibility for conducting elections. Article 1, Section 4: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” But progress, progressives have been learning for nearly 500 days, takes patience.
Progressives’ Trumpian conviction that elections are ripe for rigging was fueled by their indignation about what they called Georgia’s new “voter suppression” law. It was the subject, in January, of perhaps the most unpresidential speech in living memory, Biden’s Atlanta eruption in which he asserted that if you disagree with him about Georgia — “Jim Crow 2.0” — you are a compound of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and Bull Connor. Well.
If the Georgia law’s purpose is voter suppression, it is failing spectacularly: More than 857,000 unsuppressed Georgians voted early before Tuesday’s primaries, about triple the number who voted early in the 2018 primaries.
Welcome to the “Through the Looking Glass” world of unfalsifiable beliefs: Time was, obsessives about the John F. Kennedy assassination said that the complete absence of evidence of a conspiracy proved the conspiracy’s diabolical thoroughness. Today’s voter-suppression obsessives say the surge of Georgians voting proves the law’s wickedness — it energized voters.
Perhaps the most important of Biden’s 500 days was Feb. 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine, setting in motion momentous events, substantially influenced by Biden’s deft diplomacy. Unfortunately
for Biden, what Americans usually want in foreign policy is as little of it as possible, so his stunning achievement in the Ukraine crisis — reviving the concept of “the West” — will pay scant dividends.
The war’s disruption of global energy markets has underscored the incoherence of Biden’s fossil fuel objectives: lower supplies and lower prices. He has used maximum rhetorical shrillness, warning fossil fuels pose an “existential” threat to Earth. But a lifeless planet is a secondary terror. Biden’s promised “transition away from” oil will perhaps resume when motorists simmer down. The public might understandably conclude that Biden is least serious when using his most alarmist words.
When you’re hot, you’re hot, and when you’re not, infant formula disappears. What next? The Wall Street Journal reports: “During the past 80 years, the Fed has never lowered inflation as much as it is setting out to do now — by 4 percentage points — without causing recession.”
Four consecutive presidents have experienced their parties’ losses of the Senate and House. Biden could become the fifth — in just 24 months.
If he seeks reelection, he will need an opponent so ghastly that voters can respond as the New York Sun did with its five-word 1904 endorsement of President Theodore Roos