Under Pressure
JOE BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY WAS MEANT TO be defined by calm, experienced competence. Yet just nine months into his term, he has been teetering on the brink of failure. Vicious infighting within his own party has threatened to torpedo his ambitious domestic agenda, encapsulated in two sprawling pieces of legislation that Democrats have not yet been able to vote out of Congress. Even before the bickering over the bills, Biden’s claim to competence, based on more than 40 years in Washington, had been shredded by a calamitous exit from Afghanistan and an ongoing crisis at the southern border. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on, inflation is on the rise and there’s sideline carping every day from the president’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who seems to be campaigning three years early for a 2024 return to the White House.
Even as Biden announced the terms of a $1.75 trillion framework to salvage his signature “Build Back Better” legislation—cut in half from the bill’s original $3.5 trillion price tag—his approval rating was taking a beating. The latest Real Clear Politics average has just 42 percent of Americans approving of the job Biden has done so far, while 52 percent disapprove; that represents a sharp downturn over the past two months and a nearly 14-point drop overall from his post-inauguration peak of close to 56 percent. No president in the modern era, not Jimmy Carter, not even Donald Trump, has fallen out of grace so swiftly this soon into a presidency.
With the midterm elections now just a year away, and Democrats holding the slimmest of majorities in Congress, Biden’s nosedive has alarmed his political allies. As political commentator Van Jones, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, said on CNN, “Democrats are looking over the edge of a cliff.”
What’s over that edge? Midterm elections are historically difficult for first term presidencies. Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010, two years into Barack Obama’s first term, the worst performance by a sitting President’s party since 1938. Obama memorably described the result as “a shellacking.” Nervous Democrats now worry that 2022 could be worse.
The change in fortune has been swift. Earlier this year, when more and more Americans were getting vaccinated, Democrats were optimistic that the COVID-19 nightmare was behind us. Biden famously pegged July 4 as the demarcation point, the festive day when Americans could return to normal life. Biden’s advisers believed the President could claim a big political victory on the issue that, more than any other, got him
