Biden presidency in a year: Revived?
A year from this week, the Biden presidency will be either revived or comatose. Revived, if Democrats avoid even the small election losses that would erase their tenuous control of the House or Senate. Comatose, if in January 2023 Republicans control either chamber. Whether this occurs will partly depend on how comfortable voters are with President Biden’s promiscuous “you name it” approach to governance.
In a 1992 presidential debate with a town hall format, a young man posed a nauseating question to President George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and H. Ross Perot: “How can we as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the two of you, the three of you, to meet our needs: the needs in housing, and, and, in crime and, you name it.”
The questioner was symptomatic of many Americans’ infantile inflation of presidents as daddies. He also was a harbinger of the progressivism ascendant in today’s Democratic Party: We children have many needs and need the federal government to meet all of them.
Biden’s current precarious position is, however, a product of more than his party’s incontinent appetite for swaddling Americans in a cradle-to-grave blanket of government solicitude. Reasons for Biden’s autumn of discontent include incompetence in Afghanistan, chaos at the southern border and confusion on the president’s countenance.
The first of these is over, and next November’s election will reveal how indelible its stain is on an administration that promised a restoration of executive branch professionalism. The second will be a long-running tutorial on the wages of hubris in thinking that a problem that has vexed many administrations — a 1,954-mile land border facing troubled developing nations — would yield to the cleverness of the virtuous.
Biden’s third problem, which is his insufficient aptitude for the performative dimension of the presidency, can be surmounted if his aides will serve him, and the nation, better.
It is political malpractice for them to put him in situations that require skills that he — always garrulous, rarely fluent — has never possessed. The recent CNN town hall was redundant evidence of this: Biden sowed confusion about climate science (“if we reached beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in temperature, we’re gone. Not a joke”), who controls the National Guard (it’s not him), and Taiwan (perhaps we should, but we do not, “have a commitment” to come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacks).
It is unlikely that taciturn George Washington, or learned but cranky John Quincy Adams, or admirable but stolid Grover Cleveland, not to mention the sainted Calvin (“Silent Cal”) Coolidge, would have performed with flair when required to improvise on television.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was sometimes syntactically challenged when speaking extemporaneously, but he came to the presidency with experience wielding executive power — conducting coalition warfare — and sometimes his foggy sentences disguised his guile. Before
a 1955 news conference, his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, urged him not to answer reporters’ questions about the crisis over Formosa, as Taiwan was then known. “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower replied. “If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.” It came up, and his wonderfully meandering answer began, “The only thing I know about war are two things . . .”
With 38 months of Biden’s term remaining, stabilizing his presidency is a national imperative: Cold-eyed enemies of this nation are assessing him. Also, the weaker he seems politically, the more likely his predecessor is to seek a second term, thereby delaying restoration of the two-party system: Today’s tremulous GOP hardly counts.
Furthermore, it is in the Democratic Party’s interest for Biden to begin succeeding, and soon. That would make an early decision by him to retire in January 2025 seem statesmanlike rather than like bowing to failure. If such a decision were to come, say, late in 2023, Democrats would face an awkward fact: Vice President Kamala Harris.
As a “woman of color,” she would excite progressives obsessed with identity politics, but she would be a high-risk 2024 nominee. Harris has said that dropping out of the competition for the 2020 nomination was “one of the hardest decisions of my life.” Actually, the Democratic nominating electorate made it easy: Voters’ unenthusiastic opinion of her was why she left the race 62 days before the first votes were cast in Iowa.
Biden can be remembered fondly as the bridge to a better politics. But only if he is more politically buoyant than his polarizing agenda.