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People around Joe Biden have been talking to reporters about their frustrations — and the president's frustrations — in a spate of stories of the sort only published when you've sunk beneath 40 percent approval in some reputable polls.
"Inside a Biden White House adrift" was the headline of a much-discussed NBC News report last week. A headline on a similarly insidery POLITICO piece earlier this week noted that Biden is "seething that his standing is now worse than Trump's." A common theme is that Biden or people close to him think he should get out more, with one Biden confidant telling POLITICO that the White House needs to, in the inevitable cliche used by frustrated loyalists, "let Biden be Biden."
This, though, is not a very plausible plan, and while events have done Biden no favors (dark humor about plagues of locusts shows up in the NBC story), Biden fundamentally misconceived his presidency by misreading the political moment and his own capabilities.
It seems obvious now that the country and Biden himself would have been best-served if he had attempted an incrementalist, steady-hand presidency. Instead, he somehow decided in the course of the 2020 election that he was the revolutionary figure the country had long been waiting for. And his hand has proven anything but steady.
Every president has a theory of the case. Barack Obama's was that the nation's divisions weren't as deep as they seemed and he, a clever and gifted communicator, could talk the country out of them or around them.
This, as we all know, didn't work out. Enter Donald Trump. He believed that everything had gotten screwed up by the very stupid people running the country and he, an outsider with business skills, could set it right. Trump achieved some important, longtime conservative goals, but his presidency ended up getting engulfed by his self-generated chaos.
Biden won largely on the basis of not being Trump, yet believed the country was in a Depression-like state and needed the ministrations of a transformational FDR-type leader, namely him.
In a piece that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved at the time, Franklin Foer of The Atlantic wrote in October 2020 that Biden was becoming enamored with grand visions of transforming the country as he campaigned from his basement.
"What makes the possibility of a Biden presidency so promising," Foer wrote, "isn't simply that he will ambitiously deploy government, but that he'll sweat the politics of that expansion; he'll worry about the marketing and attempt to preempt an inevitable backlash. In a time when the public has lost faith in institutions, he has a history of building that trust."
This was both incredibly prescient and astonishingly wrongheaded. Yes, Biden tried to go big, but he didn't have the congressional majorities to support anything like an FDR-style agenda and he lacked the suppleness and skills to get the big calls right or move the needle of public opinion.
The big burst of optimism about Biden on the left came early in 2021 when he passed a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill that turned out to be a grievous misjudgment. It was a classic case of fighting the last war — because the consensus on the center-left is that Obama's stimulus bill in the wake of the financial crisis was too small, Biden was not going to make that mistake again. Instead, he blew right by warnings about potentially overstimulating the economy from Larry Summers and reportedly his own Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and spent much too much.
When inflation was on the rise, in part because of the tsunami of federal spending, Biden dismissed it and wanted to pass trillions more. The only thing that saved him from potentially throwing more fuel on the fire was West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who correctly sounded the alarm about inflation and got berated by members of his own party for his trouble.
Meanwhile, in other, highly consequential instances of overly rigid thinking, Biden pulled out of Afghanistan despite the warning of his generals (he'd watched Obama supposedly get rolled by his generals, so he wasn't going to let that happen to him) and reversed many of Trump's border-control policies (apparently believing whatever Trump did on the border must be, by definition, immoral).
Both of these moves created crises where none had existed upon his taking office, and duly undermined faith in Biden's competence and reliability.
Now, the answer some people around the president have to all this is unleash Biden to make the case for all that he's accomplished. But even a combination of FDR and Ronald Reagan would have trouble talking people into feeling good about an economy with an 8.3 percent inflation rate, declining real wages, and negative 1.5 percent GDP growth in the first quarter. Biden, needless to say, is neither of those men.
It is true that he has retail campaigning abilities and the back-slapping charm of an old-school pol — the hair-sniffing and shoulder massages that got him briefly in trouble during the Democratic primaries were part of his tactile quality as a politician.
Biden complains, per the POLITICO report, about not interacting with voters more. He'd surely be great at July Fourth picnics. What does that get him, though? He's not running for the Wilmington, Del., City Council; he's trying to lead a continental nation that is deeply discontented.
As for Biden being Biden, sure, authenticity always matters. The White House gives every indication, however, of realizing that what should be its main weapon, POTUS himself, is a flawed vessel. Whenever Biden is on the stage, even reading a teleprompter speech, there's the possibility of a gaffe, and not a trifle like forgetting a name or what city he might be in — no, an international-incident-type gaffe that will reverberate in foreign capitals.
The NBC News piece relates that Biden is cross at his staff for so often cleaning up his statements. One wonders what they are supposed to do in his mind? Leave the impression that the U.S. seeks regime change in Russia and is committed to fighting China over Taiwan? If Biden wants to make these positions into U.S. policy, it is in his power to do so. Instead, he went along with the cleanup operations because they were appropriate and necessary.
Another means of the White House trying to get out of the current mess is more common-sensical and less complicated — attacking Republicans. But trying to make a big thing out of one bullet point in Florida Sen. Rick Scott's draft policy agenda, as the White House attempted for a few weeks, was never going to work. It's understandable the White House would want to try to recover the advantages of running against Trump, yet Biden is now the one sitting in the Oval Office and walking out to Marine One every day; Trump is nowhere on the ballot; and events having nothing to do with Trump one way or the other, like the baby formula shortage, are now dominating the news.
Perhaps Biden can recover if Republicans take control of Congress and over-reach — it's happened before. Or perhaps events will at some point turn in Biden's favor. But people around Biden, and Biden himself, would be well-served by more self-awareness. The difficulties of his administration have largely been a function of Biden indeed being Biden, and there's no easy way around it.
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