Biden’s Blunders
Levan Ramishvili
They are responsibilities that Biden cannot handle. Not only has he failed to solve the problems he identified during the campaign; he’s created a whole new set of challenges that run from America’s southern border to the Hindu Kush. As a result, the public has re-evaluated his conduct and capability. The buzzwords that filled coverage of Biden’s early days — “hypercompetent,” “normalcy,” “unity,” “transformative” — now seem inappropriate and silly. The comparisons that some pundits made last spring between Biden and LBJ, FDR, and Ronald Reagan were premature at the time. Now they just look ridiculous.
Every presidency has bad moments. What makes Biden’s rough patch notable is its suddenness and contingency. Only a few months ago, it might have seemed as if he was making progress on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. Unexpected developments, as well as unforced errors on the border and in Afghanistan, have now undermined confidence in his leadership and eroded his public standing. The Delta variant of the coronavirus, inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and national humiliation at the hands of the Taliban have done more than complicate Biden’s efforts to sign into law the largest expansion of government since the Great Society. They have put Democratic control of Congress at risk — and the country in jeopardy.
Biden is president because his priorities tracked closely with those of the 2020 electorate. Take the coronavirus pandemic. The plurality of voters who rated it the most important issue in a postelection poll by Fox News supported Biden two to one. While the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research had a slightly more complicated and confusing issue breakdown, it also showed that the voters who had rated either the pandemic or health-care policy as the most important issue went for Biden by lopsided margins.
Americans gave Biden’s coronavirus response high marks during the first half of the year. He took the pandemic seriously. His team ramped up production and distribution of the vaccines authorized for emergency use under his predecessor. In a March speech, Biden predicted that the summer of 2021 would “begin to mark our independence from this virus.” In May, the Centers for Disease Control announced that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to wear masks indoors. Case numbers and deaths plunged from January through July.
Then things got worse. The first sign that Biden wasn’t in charge of the situation came in April, when the Food and Drug Administration temporarily paused injections of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This decision arrested the momentum of the vaccination campaign and illustrated the dangers of bureaucratic caprice. Meanwhile, the Delta variant of the virus spread among the unvaccinated. Case numbers picked up. Hospitalizations and deaths followed. On July 27, the CDC reversed its previous guidance and recommended once again that vaccinated people in areas of high transmission wear masks indoors. The messages from public-health authorities were contradictory, confusing, and dispiriting. Biden seemed powerless.
What was once a political asset turned into a liability. Two-thirds of adults approved of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus in a February 2021 Gallup poll. By August, that number had dropped 16 points. “All party groups are now more critical of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus situation compared with February,” wrote pollster Jeffrey M. Jones, “with approval among Republicans and independents down roughly 20 points.” Moreover, independents have begun to disapprove of Biden’s performance in general. As recently as June, they gave him a job-approval rating of 55 percent. Only 43 percent of independents approved in August.
The pandemic was not even the only crisis in which Biden was flailing. The economy was never his best issue — voters for whom it was the top priority in 2020 went for Donald Trump — but the gradual recovery from the coronavirus-induced recession and the passage of the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan helped Biden’s standing at the beginning of his term. In the February Gallup poll, 54 percent of adults approved of his handling of the economy. By August, however, that rating had fallen to 46 percent.
The reason was inflation. Rising prices have increased the cost of living, diminished wage gains, and soured voters on the president’s economic management. In a Morning Consult poll from late July, 59 percent of registered voters blamed Biden for inflation. In early August, a Hill-HarrisX poll found that inflation was registered voters’ top economic worry. Around the same time, 86 percent of the registered voters surveyed in a Fox News poll said that it was a concern. The president’s response has been to downplay the threat. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and expected to be temporary,” Biden said in July. He hopes so.
Neither racial inequity nor climate change has proven any easier for Biden to fix. “For the second consecutive year, U.S. adults’ positive ratings of relations between Black and White Americans are at their lowest point in more than two decades of measurement,” wrote Gallup’s Megan Brenan in July. Judges have blocked Biden’s attempt to forgive the debts of minority farmers because it violates civil-rights law. Parents nationwide have rebelled against school boards eager to import critical race theory into the classroom. The Black Lives Matter movement has hemorrhaged support. In June 2020, as Biden planned his nomination-acceptance speech, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of U.S. adults found 57 percent of them approving Black Lives Matter. One year later, 42 percent of Americans approved.
The public is worried about crime. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll from early summer, two-thirds of adults said that crime had grown worse over the past year. One-third of adults said that they had witnessed a crime spike in their own neighborhood. Seventy percent of adults called for additional funding for police departments. Seventy-seven percent wanted more cops on the beat. Navigator, a Democratic polling company, reported in July that majorities of Democrats, independents, Republicans, blacks, Hispanics, and whites considered violent crime a “major crisis.” In late June, as fears over public safety became unignorable, Biden tried to reframe the crime debate as an argument for gun control. His messaging flopped.
A similar atmosphere of irrelevance and impotence surrounds Biden’s climate policy. Biden reentered the Paris climate agreement but is far from reaching a deal to limit either China’s or India’s greenhouse-gas emissions. He signed a nonbinding, symbolic executive order calling for half of the new auto fleet manufactured each year to be composed of electric vehicles by 2030. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, paused the issuance of new drilling leases on public lands and waters, suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that the Trump administration had approved, and is under pressure from the Left to restrict U.S. exports of liquid natural gas.
None of these moves will appease Greta Thunberg. Nor will they lower energy prices for everyday Americans, reduce the trade deficit, or weaken America’s adversaries. They are the definition of counterproductive.
Biden also made a big show of undoing his predecessor’s immigration policies. He suspended construction of the border wall. He lifted the so-called Muslim ban on travel and immigration from 13 countries. He ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum-seekers to wait there as U.S. courts adjudicated their claims. He exited the “safe third country” agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that instructed migrants to apply for asylum in the first nation they entered. He exempted minors from “Title 42” protocols that allow for rapid deportation during public-health emergencies.
Guess what happened next. The number of individuals detained on the southern border swelled. Every month broke records. July was the busiest month on the border in 21 years. Never has the United States taken into custody more family units and unaccompanied minors. When the fiscal year ends on September 30, more than 1 million illegal migrants will have been detained. Many of them have been released into the U.S. interior.
Biden can neither explain nor stop the deluge. At first, he said that the surge was seasonal. It wasn’t. Then Vice President Harris traveled to Guatemala and told migrants not to come. They kept coming. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas recently told Border Patrol agents that “we can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.” Note his use of the present tense. The Trump administration did build a system that mostly secured the southern border. Biden wrecked it.
The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is another direct consequence of Biden’s ineptitude. His failure to plan for the chaos that would follow America’s exit resulted in a humanitarian disaster and a potential mass-hostage situation as some 6,000 U.S. troops evacuated tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghan partners from a single airport in Kabul ringed by Taliban checkpoints. Biden’s word has been exposed as worthless. He said that the Afghan army wouldn’t fall to the Taliban. It did. He said that al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan. It is. He said that our allies haven’t questioned America’s credibility. They have. The British parliament held the withdrawal in contempt, and former British prime minister Tony Blair called the logic behind it “imbecilic.”
That’s an understatement. As the 78-year-old Biden gets ready to exit the political arena, he seems intent on recreating the conditions that prevailed when he entered it a half century ago. Inflation, crime, American retreat — these hallmarks of the 1970s have returned. And they have joined postmodern threats, such as a worldwide pandemic, unchecked migration, climate change, and the global jihadist-Salafist movement. Biden has been president for less than a year. The number of crises buffeting American politics, economics, society, and culture already has multiplied beyond his control.
In the run-up to the 2020 campaign, President Obama reportedly told a fellow Democrat, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” No one will make that mistake anytime soon.
Levan Ramishvili
This Sept. 11, a diminished president will preside over a diminished nation.
We are a country that could not keep a demagogue from the White House; could not stop an insurrectionist mob from storming the Capitol; could not win (or at least avoid losing) a war against a morally and technologically retrograde enemy; cannot conquer a disease for which there are safe and effective vaccines; and cannot bring itself to trust the government, the news media, the scientific establishment, the police or any other institution meant to operate for the common good.
A civilization “is born stoic and dies epicurean,” wrote historian Will Durant about the Babylonians. Our civilization was born optimistic and enlightened, at least by the standards of the day. Now it feels as if it’s fading into paranoid senility.
Joe Biden was supposed to be the man of the hour: a calming presence exuding decency, moderation and trust. As a candidate, he sold himself as a transitional president, a fatherly figure in the mold of George H.W. Bush who would restore dignity and prudence to the Oval Office after the mendacity and chaos that came before. It’s why I voted for him, as did so many others who once tipped red.
Instead, Biden has become the emblem of the hour: headstrong but shaky, ambitious but inept. He seems to be the last person in America to realize that, whatever the theoretical merits of the decision to withdraw our remaining troops from Afghanistan, the military and intelligence assumptions on which it was built were deeply flawed, the manner in which it was executed was a national humiliation and a moral betrayal, and the timing was catastrophic.
We find ourselves commemorating the first great jihadist victory over America, in 2001, right after delivering the second great jihadist victory over America, in 2021. The 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center — water cascading into one void, and then trickling, out of sight, into another — has never felt more fitting.
Now Biden proposes to follow this up with his $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which The Times’s Jonathan Weisman describes as “the most significant expansion of the nation’s safety net since the war on poverty in the 1960s.”
When Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, its associated legislation — from food stamps to Medicare — passed with bipartisan majorities in a lopsidedly Democratic Congress. Biden has similar ambitions without the same political means. This is not going to turn out well.
Last week, Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which he said, “I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs.”
Is the White House paying any more attention to Manchin’s message than it did to classified intelligence briefs over the summer warning of the prospect of a swift Taliban victory?
Even the optimistic precedent was followed by a Democratic rout in 2010, when the party lost 63 House seats. If history repeats itself at the 2022 midterms, I doubt that even Joe Biden’s closest aides think he has the stamina to fight his way back in 2024. Has Kamala Harris shown the political talent to pick up the pieces?
Perhaps what will save the Democrats is that Biden’s weakness will tempt Donald Trump to seek (and almost certainly gain) the Republican nomination. But then there’s the chance he’d win the election.
There’s a way back from this cliff’s edge. It begins with Biden finding a way to acknowledge publicly the gravity of his administration’s blunders. The most shameful aspect of the Afghanistan withdrawal was the incompetence of the State Department when it came to expediting visas for thousands of people eligible to come to the United States. Accountability could start with Antony Blinken’s resignation.
The president might also seize the “strategic pause” Manchin has proposed and push House Democrats to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill without holding it hostage to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Infrastructure is far more popular with middle-of-the-road voters than the Great Society reprise that was never supposed to be a part of the Biden brand.
My sense is that Biden will do neither. The last few months have told us something worrying about this president: He’s proud, inflexible, and thinks he’s much smarter than he really is. That’s bad news for the administration. It’s worse news for a country that desperately needs to avoid another failed presidency.