Is Joe Biden’s Presidency actually “dead,” “failed,” and all but “over,” as you have surely heard by now? The Republicans and their conservative allies in the commentariat, including some notable Never Trumpers, think so. Jim Geraghty, in National Review, wrote this week that Biden is both “flailing” and “failing,” and that the President and his Administration are “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads.” Matt Lewis, in the Daily Beast, wrote something similar, under the headline “It Took Biden 48 Years to Be President and 8 Months to Fuck It Up.” At least Geraghty and Lewis gave Biden until this week. In the Times, Bret Stephens warned of “another failed presidency at hand” the day after Labor Day, even before Congress came back to town, when it was yet to be seen whether legislators would enact Biden’s agenda—or sink it.
All of which strikes me as wildly overstated, a conservative analogue to the many progressives who declared Biden the second coming of F.D.R. this spring, merely because he had proposed a wave of expensive progressive legislation that may or may not ever get through Congress. It was too soon then to nominate him to a place on Mount Rushmore; it is too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history. What we might be seeing, instead, is a bit of a return to normalcy in American politics—the kind of normalcy in which a President’s job-approval rating goes up or down depending on how people think he is actually doing. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were also considered by many to be failed Presidents early on in their tenures, and saw their parties each lose their first midterm elections as a result; both went on to be among the most popular two-term Presidents of the modern era.
The warning lights are undoubtedly flashing red for Biden right now. His Gallup approval rating is down to forty-three per cent, a drop of six points in the past month—which saw a deadly surge of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan—and a thirteen-point decline since June. The Pew Research Center, in a poll released on Thursday, showed Biden at forty-four per cent, down eleven points from July. The failed-Presidency crowd sees this as the inevitable outcome of a leader who strayed from the promise of his campaign to oust Donald Trump—to return America to competent, sane governance—and instead embraced a politically impractical vision of a progressive utopia.
Many liberals do not agree, of course. But it seems that the table stakes for the Biden Presidency—and the country—may finally have become too big this week, even for diehard Biden supporters. No wonder. Biden’s entire legislative agenda is tied up in a September snarl on Capitol Hill, as Democrats feud over how to proceed. In the meantime, the country is averaging more than two thousand deaths per day in a pandemic that Biden promised would be all but over this summer. An immigration crisis, with thousands of Haitian refugees at the southern U.S. border, has liberals furious at the Administration’s Storm Trooper-esque tactics and conservatives in full Trumpian build-the-wall mode. France is so angry at the United States, for stealing away a multibillion-dollar submarine deal with Australia, that it recalled its Ambassador, in a snit, for the first time ever. Oh, and the government may be forced to shut down after next Friday unless Congress passes a bill to stop it—a bill that Republicans vow to oppose. In October, the U.S. is set to run out of credit unless Congress raises the debt-ceiling limit, and Republicans vow to oppose that, too. The general feeling among Democrats these days: Is it time to panic yet?
It’s not surprising, of course, when those who want Biden to fail label him as having failed. The New York Post, a Trumpian mouthpiece, editorialized that Biden was “failing the nation” back in May. After Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan exit, in August, the Post’s op-ed page was more definitive: Biden was a “failed President.” The official Republican Party communications shop was even faster to label Biden’s Presidency a flop—“Joe Biden’s 100 Days of Failure,” the G.O.P. declared back in April—which was only notable, I suppose, because the Party of Trump was at least acknowledging that Biden was actually the President.
More notable, however, is that many in the current group of Biden critics at least nominally supported him, voted for him, and presumably wanted him to succeed; columnists such as Lewis and Stephens are not reflexive Biden-bashers but Never Trump Republicans who spent the past few years criticizing the G.O.P. for its embrace of Trump. And one important reason that Biden’s numbers have dropped so much over all is that independents are losing faith—independents whose votes in key states very likely gave Biden the White House. No doubt some of this is simply conservatives reverting to their ideological comfort zone. That, in and of itself, is an example of the post-Trump return to regular order that Biden had promised. In the absence of a ranting demagogue in the White House, it was probably never realistic to expect conservatives to be supportive of a transformative legislative package with the biggest price tag in modern political history.
The warnings, however, are not just coming from budget hawks. Many of those who now fear Biden’s Presidency is on the line include Democrats who support his goals but fear that he will not deliver. The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden’s bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from.
Consider John Podesta’s letter to congressional Democrats this week, a cri de coeur from a senior adviser to the past two Democratic Presidents. In it, he urges them to figure out—now!—a compromise that would allow final passage of some version of both the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has already passed the Senate, and the $3.5-trillion budget-reconciliation bill. He wants progressives to get real about the price tag and moderates to give up on the idea of voting for the smaller infrastructure bill without going along with the bigger spending package, which will need the votes of essentially every Democratic member in both the House and the Senate to pass. The money quote, as cited by the Times: “You are either getting both bills or neither—and the prospect of neither is unconscionable. It would signal a complete and utter failure of our democratic duty, and a reckless abdication of our responsibility. It would define our generation’s history and show that, when our time came, we failed, both for Americans now and in the years to come.”
President Biden’s response to this freak-out moment has been revealing. He has not, à la Trump, taken to Twitter to denounce the dissenting members of his party as “DINOs,” though I’m sure Biden, like his White House predecessors, wishes he could dismiss those who are failing to fall in line as “Democrats in Name Only.” (Then again, what is more Democratic than fighting with one another?) He has not fired anybody or started lining up primary challengers to his own party’s members of Congress who have angered him. He has not called up MSNBC hosts in a panic for advice. (At least, not that I am aware of.)
Instead, Biden’s approach to the matter of the irreconcilable camps in his party is very similar to his approach to everything—a philosophy neatly summed up in his address to the U.N. General Assembly this week as “relentless diplomacy,” rather than “relentless war.” On Wednesday, Biden spent five hours with Democratic members of Congress, in various groupings, in search of an elusive deal, and will surely be working the phones right up until Monday’s deadline for the House vote on the infrastructure bill—and beyond. No one doubts that Biden is ready to talk this to death.
But diplomacy, like war, is a tactic, not an end in itself. The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them. Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible. The U.S. is no longer a lone superpower unchallenged abroad; the Democratic Party is barely a majority party in the U.S. Congress. It’s a fifty-fifty Senate, and a fifty-fifty world. In a purely practical sense, the challenge for Biden is that he hasn’t got to the hard part yet. He can’t negotiate with China or the Republicans until he negotiates with his allies. France and the House progressives, ironically, are the obstacles of the week, not Xi Jinping and Mitch McConnell.
Maybe it will all work out. After a tense phone call with Biden, Emmanuel Macron is sending his Ambassador back to Washington; the two Presidents seem to be in the “at least they’re talking” stage of the spat. As for Congress, the Democrats’ large progressive caucus has spent the past few months adoring Biden for agreeing to put forward a budget bill filled with so many of their priorities, from taxpayer-funded elder care to universal pre-K, from free community college to middle-class tax cuts—to the point that they anointed this period the second coming of the Great Society before the measure had even gone through a single committee-markup vote. Now that they have to compromise, Biden doesn’t seem as appealing. But will they really abandon him? In the Senate, do the centrist Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema want to appear in the first paragraph of Biden’s obituary, which is surely what will happen if they sink his Presidency? A career’s worth of experience tells me that congressional deals always seem most out of reach right before they are reached.
Steven Dennis, a Senate reporter for Bloomberg, summed this up on Twitter better than any news analysis. His tweet, in its entirety, substitutes for the many, many articles you are likely to read over the next few weeks:
