Biden overshoots on what’s possible in DC
President struggling to deliver on ambitious agenda amid partisanship
WASHINGTON – He was supposed to break through the congressional logjam. End the pandemic. Get the economy back on track.
Days before he hits his one-year mark in office, a torrent of bad news is gnawing at the foundational rationale of President Joe Biden’s presidency: that he could get the job done.
In the space of a week, Biden has been confronted by record inflation, COVID-19 testing shortages and school disruptions, and the second big slapdown of his domestic agenda in as many months by members of his own party. This time, it’s his voting rights push that seems doomed.
Add to that the Supreme Court’s rejection of a centerpiece of his coronavirus response, and Biden’s argument – that his five decades in Washington uniquely positioned him to deliver on an immensely ambitious agenda – was at risk of crumbling this week.
Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said Biden’s sweeping promises have collided with the realities of enacting change in a divided Washington where his party has only the slimmest margins of control in Congress.
“I don’t think there’s any way to reach any other conclusion than he’s overshot here,” Engel said. “It’s important to separate the politically possible from the politically desirable.”
Biden’s troubles extend back to August, when the administration executed a chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the president’s professed competence was already under question as migrants multiplied at the southern border with no clear federal plan in sight. It deteriorated further as inflation that was supposed to be “transitory” only intensified at the end of the year.
“I’ve been hired to solve problems,” Biden said last March during his first news conference in office. Yet they’ve proven persistent.
The difficulty of navigating Washington’s vexing partisanship and the unpredictability of the presidency should have come as no surprise to Biden, a senator for more than three decades who also spent eight years as vice president.
Biden is unlikely to get much sympathy from the public for his predicament.
Even with the now widespread protection of vaccination, new scenes of long virus testing lines and sold-out grocery store shelves hark back to the chaotic earliest days of the pandemic and drag down the nation’s psyche.
The administration is going all-out to counter that mindset and demonstrate it’s on top of the virus.
A federal website to send free COVID-19 tests to Americans’ doorsteps will launch next week – a speedy turnaround after Biden first announced the initiative in December – but one that nonetheless struck even allies as coming far too late to blunt the winter virus surge that should have been expected.
That announcement was overshadowed by a Supreme Court ruling against the administration’s rule requiring large employers to have their workers get vaccinated or be subject to weekly COVID testing. White House officials had always anticipated legal challenges, and many in the administration believe just the rollout of the rule helped drive millions of people to get vaccinated. Still, the ruling stung.