There has been quite a bit of talk lately about whether Joe Biden should just ride off into the sunset in 2024 and not run for president again. Conservative commentator David Gergen has made it known that he doesn’t believe anyone over 80 should run for president, and Biden would be a few weeks before his 82nd birthday on election day 2024. Biden has certainly slowed down cognitively since 2016, let alone 1987 when he first entered a primary for president. Democrat leadership seems especially concerned that Biden’s perceived mental abilities will further deteriorate, and this will have an effect on his electability.
Whether or not this is a fair assessment is beside the point, because this is a question in the minds of too many people, and Biden has on more than a few occasions appeared less able to express himself clearly. That doesn’t mean he is less intelligent; it just means that age is having an effect on his memory that is “normal” for most people his age—and that is something that people may believe disqualifies one to be president. On the other hand, people knew this in 2020, and he was elected anyway, probably because more people just wanted anyone besides Donald Trump.
Of course this isn’t the only problem that seems to be affecting Biden’s approval ratings, although one suspects that if Biden seemed more in “control” of the situation, people might trust more that he knows what he is doing. It doesn’t help that Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval ratings are underwater as well, and that isn’t fostering trust in “Plan B.”
Of the presidents of the past 30 years, only George Bush’s approval rating wasn’t underwater 18 months into his presidency, and that was due to 9-11, when his approval rating skyrocketed to near 90 percent; since then there continues to be the suspicion that he was warned at least two months in advance that bin Laden was planning an attack with hijacked planes, and he did nothing (which may explain the “surprise” on his face when initially informed of the attack during that school visit). Biden’s approval rating is below 39 percent, the lowest of the past five presidents.
A RearClearPolitics poll claims that 75 percent of respondents think that the country is on the “wrong track,” although people should remember that RCP tends to have a right-wing slant and thus biased. Wrong compared to what? Trump's presidency? What happened on January 6? We are told the economy is the principle driving force behind the discontent, involving mainly inflation and gas prices. Neither one of these does Biden have much control over, in fact no president really does.
Although we can conjecture that the costs of keeping Ukraine armed, the blockage of grain exports and the embargo on Russian oil by the EU (which of course is causing inflation issues there) is part of the problem, a bigger problem is that after the shrinking of the economy and consumer spending during the pandemic (which of course Trump wasn’t blamed for), the unease with Biden being “strong” enough to give the impression that he is at least capable of making the right moves now has made him an easy target for “saboteurs.”
One of those is a Democrat, although at present not Manchin or Sinema. New Jersey Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer, for example, is being accused of sabotaging the latest slimmed down Build Back Better plan that Manchin seemed on the cusp of approving, by getting together with his “centrist” colleagues and forcing the exclusion of the higher tax rates on the top one percent and the increased funding to the IRS for tax enforcement. Gottheimer is accused of wrecking Democrats chances in the midterms, and Biden’s job approval rating, by doing the bidding of his corporate puppet masters who bankroll him, while preventing the rest of the Democrats a “win” to show that they are actually doing something to improve the economy.
However, Tom Nichols in The Atlantic writes that it is unfair to cast blame on Biden for things he can’t control, and he isn’t pretending that he can. “The Joe Biden who ran in 2020 appeared wiser, sadder, somewhat deflated, and seemed to be taking on the presidency as a public service and a burden.” In his opinion, Biden has done “a pretty good job, especially given the fact that he’s dealing with a pandemic, revelations about an attempted American coup d’état, and an economic slowdown over which he had no control.”
Nichols isn’t alone in this opinion; take for instance actor Mickey Rourke, who says he voted for the first time in 2020 because he thought it was important to get rid of Trump. In an interview with Piers Morgan, he says he doesn’t regret voting for Biden; he’s doing what he can do with the mess he’s got on his hands, Rourke says, after that “thing” that came before: “It’s going to take another 30 years to straighten this country out.” He also mentioned that his home in Texas is “fortified,” and that if some gun-toting Trump fanatic tries to take two steps inside his property, those will be the “last ones they’ll take.”
Nichols goes on to point out that so far Biden has managed to “head off World War III and a possible nuclear conflict” which is “job one for every American president.” Trump of course claims that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he had been president, but we are talking about a man who has said that Ukraine was “Europe’s problem” and fostered a negative relationship with our allies and support for NATO. You have ignoramuses like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson defending Putin by claiming that he was only reacting to the “threat” of Ukraine joining NATO, but this was Kremlin propaganda used to “justify” the invasion the Putin had already intended on doing. Remember that Putin had denied he intended to invade right up to the very day it happened. What would have been Trump’s response? Probably nothing, and the whole of the Ukraine would already have been overrun.
Nichols asserts that Americans blaming Biden for “everything,” makes little sense; he can't control an overheated consumer base flushed with money but with not enough to buy, thus the high inflation. But is it really “hurting” people as much as they think? I go to a convenience store and observe that the hot food on sale has seen an unjustified price hike. Do I buy an item anyways? No, it’s just an impulse buy and I don’t need it; from what I can tell a lot of other people think the same. If the proprietors want to sell this stuff instead of throwing it away and losing money, they’ll do something about the price eventually.
Nichols notes that while
Republicans expect to retake the House, they don’t exactly have a plan for
governance, and they never seem to, except if it has something to do with
cutting taxes, cutting social programs, or building a wall. The Republican
Party is now controlled by its “wackiest members” who now represent what is now
the “base,” whose ideas are so crackpot that most people either don’t take them
seriously, or just prefer to humor them so that don’t become too much of an
embarrassment. Unless, of course, you have a president just as crazed as they are.
Today’s Republican Party complains a lot, but doesn’t offer any “plans” to make things “better.” Well, they do have a “plan”: to impeach Biden, not for any justifiable reason, but because they don’t know what else to do that will keep the “base” happy—which as mentioned before has no more ability to think logically about what it wants than Taz the Tasmanian Devil.
We can debate about whose fault it is that most Americans seem uneducated or uncaring about what is wrong with this country, or the world in general, and how it got to this point. The January 6 investigation is revealling the result of a decades-long Republican effort to foster political, social and cultural division (there used to be “liberal” Republicans, like the late Arlen Specter, who switched parties in 2010). Nichols says “We are just not capable of understanding that at home, we are inches away from the meltdown of our constitutional system of government, and abroad, we are one errant cruise missile away from a nuclear crisis.”
Instead of looking inward and taking responsibility for their own choices—like, say, voting for certifiable crackpots like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—many Americans are looking for a scapegoat, and Biden is, well, the president and he is “responsible” for…what? The economy? The Federal Reserve Board has more power to control the economy than he does. What positive things a president can do is to relieve the pressure of a recession with stimulus packages that Republicans usually oppose.
But in general, the president cannot control what businesses do. Why did GDP fall last quarter? In part because in the “recovery” from the pandemic retailers piled up too much stock of winter items consumers are not now buying, and now they are waiting for that inventory to sell out before ordering new product; another reason is a dependency on imports due to domestic supply chain issues.
As far as gas prices are concerned, the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, but unlike other countries that produce and refine most or all of its domestic consumption, U.S. oil producers insist on gouging American consumers for higher and higher profits (people keep talking about the Keystone pipeline, of which the oil is almost wholly for export and just an "easier" way for Canada to send out its oil while the U.S. foots the environmental costs). Is the oil industry doing this deliberately to hurt Biden, and Democrats generally, politically and help their Republican “friends”? Probably.
Nichols points out that it is too easy to blame Biden, and “in doing so, we let ourselves off the hook for any responsibility either for our own actions as voters, or for any requirement to face our problems together with resilience and understanding.” People voted for Trump in 2016 and now three extremist justices are on the Supreme Court, so don’t blame the court for doing things like overturning Roe v. Wade—blame yourself for allowing Trump to do that in the first place, among many, many other things like making this country doubt its system of government.
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