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Opinion: The rush to label Biden a failed president is wildly premature

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Max Boot
Columnist
Today at 10:21 a.m. EST


President Biden’s first six months were full of hope and expectation. He was touted in some quarters as a combination of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mister Rogers — someone who could unite the country, pass significant social welfare legislation and put the pandemic behind us.
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The past six months — ever since the outbreak of the delta variant and the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer — have been full of disappointment and recriminations. The narrative of frustration became entrenched last week when the Supreme Court threw out the president’s vaccination mandate for large companies and it became obvious that Biden doesn’t have the votes in the Senate to pass either voting rights legislation or his Build Back Better Act.
Polls show that Biden is more unpopular after his first year than any other president since 1945, except for Donald Trump, and he is already being written off by some as a failed president. We’ve gone straight from the honeymoon to the divorce.







At the risk of having my Pundits Union card revoked, may I say that such sweeping judgments, both good and bad, are wildly premature? Biden was never going to be another FDR or LBJ, not with only 50 votes in the Senate. He was lucky to pass more than $3 trillion in spending last year, with $1.2 trillion of that coming in a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Why isn’t that good enough for his supporters?
But nor is he destined to become another Jimmy Carter — a one-term president who is widely, perhaps unfairly, perceived as a failure.

A large part of Biden’s problem is that presidents get blamed for a lot of things they have little control over — in his case, covid-19 and inflation. Granted, his pandemic recovery bill was too large at $1.9 trillion and helped to unleash inflation, just as some honest liberals had warned. But there were always going to be supply chain woes and inflationary pressures as the economy emerged from the covid recession. (Inflation has also risen in Europe, although not as much.)



While inflation eats away at consumers’ purchasing power, the economy is still roaring ahead with record-setting job creation in 2021. And after initially dismissing inflation as “temporary,” Biden has also taken some effective actions, such as working to clear up bottlenecks at ports. More important, he has nominated Jerome H. Powell for another term as Federal Reserve chair. As a Republican, Powell has the credibility to tackle inflation, whatever the short-term cost to Biden politically. Many economists still expect inflation to ease this year. If it does, Biden’s political fortunes will improve.
As for the coronavirus, it has proved more pervasive than anticipated, and Biden is paying the price. But it’s hardly his fault that the omicron variant spread around the world, or that Republican governors and Supreme Court justices are sabotaging vaccination mandates, or that only 59 percent of Republicans are vaccinated (compared with 91 percent of Democrats). Biden has been slow to roll out coronavirus tests and inexplicably failed to impose a vaccination mandate for domestic air travel, but he has done an excellent job of making vaccines available. If the pandemic finally abates this year (as the chief executive of Pfizer expects), Biden will reap some delayed benefit.
Amazingly, Biden is now being pilloried for “divisiveness” — a fault that more accurately should be ascribed to his Republican critics. It’s impossible for him to bring comity to our polarized politics given that 71 percent of Republicans don’t even recognize that he was legitimately elected. The GOP continues to follow a failed former president who incited a violent insurrection. What’s more divisive than that?



Has Biden blundered? Sure. He was too precipitous with his Afghanistan pullout and too ambitious with his voting rights bills and the Build Back Better Act. On the legislative front, he needs to think smaller: Try to pass reform of the Electoral Count Act and a few pieces of the Build Back Better Act that might generate some GOP support.
He also needs to make more of a break with left-wing extremists by denouncing damn-fool ideas such as rolling back prosecutions during a crime wave (as so many progressive district attorneys are doing), closing schools to appease teachers unions, allowing noncitizens to vote and taking down statues of the Founding Fathers. Allowing the Democratic Party to be identified with these unpopular initiatives is political suicide, as the Virginia governor’s race showed.
It might be too late to save Democratic majorities in Congress, but Biden still has plenty of time to recover before 2024. His trump card, so to speak, is his likely opponent. Trump might be the weakest candidate that Republicans could field, but he gives no impression of stepping aside. Witness his attacks on a potential rival — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump’s monumental ego has endangered the republic. It might yet prove Biden’s salvation — and ours.

 
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