By David Faris, The Week
Squandered promise in a presidency that was supposed to be transformational.
It was supposed to be “an FDR-sized presidency.”
In the spring and summer of 2020, after Joe Biden had rolled up the Democratic nomination and polls were predicting a decisive, double-digit victory over incumbent President Donald Trump plus big gains in Congress, the possibility of a real governing majority for Democrats felt tantalizingly real. Instead, the election was closer than anticipated, leaving the new president with almost unworkably narrow majorities in the House and especially the Senate. In the year since his hopeful inauguration, President Biden has been frustrated at almost every turn.
The warp-speed evaporation of Biden’s popularity will be compared to the similar first-year erosion for Trump in 2017. But the process was markedly different. Biden has not deliberately engineered a series of constitutional crises, nor has he corruptly abused his power in the ways that chipped away at his public standing. While Biden’s rhetoric about the voluntarily unvaccinated has grown increasingly harsh, much of the public shares his contempt for the people deliberately keeping the pandemic roiling. And whereas Trump managed to become broadly disliked despite overseeing a booming pre-pandemic economy, Biden’s low marks are due significantly to problems he inherited and, realistically, can only do so much to address.
