Is Biden Failing? Or Not?
13 Months of the Biden-Harris Administration
Photo Credit: whitehouse.gov
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By Pamela Hilliard Owens
Sigh. Ever since the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pollsters have traced the popularity (or the lack thereof) of presidents, and at this writing, the job approval rating of President Joe Biden is hovering around 40%. His approval rating among Democrats has dropped in the last year, especially for younger people.
How People Think Biden Has Failed
Many people think he “botched” the withdrawal from Afghanistan, apparently not realizing that President Biden was adhering to a timeline set by The Former Guy, but also following his own beliefs that we should have left Afghanistan a decade ago. Many people also do not realize that the evacuation of Kabul, over 120,000 people in two weeks, was one of the biggest airlifts in history, as tens of thousands of Afghans attempted to flee the Taliban at the same time. By contrast, 7,000 were airlifted by helicopter out of Saigon in1975.
A lot of people are also blaming Biden for the fact that COVID is still with us, now going into its third year. I am one of those who thought it was an overreaching mistake for Biden to plan to “declare” that COVID was over on July 4th, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. To be fair, the president based that optimism on people following his plan of 70% of Americans having at least one vaccination. Well, we know how that worked out.
Because of the rightwing politicization of the vaccines, the mask mandates, the science, the scientists, and even the fact that the virus actually exists at all, served to seriously hamstring the efforts of the president to contain COVID, while also allowing the delta and omicron variants to mutate and make things worse.
Then, of course, there were the dual issues of the supply chain problems and the highest inflation rates in forty years. Both of those are global phenomena primarily brought on by pent-up demand and people having more disposable income because they spent less while on lockdown. But Biden is being blamed anyway.
How Biden is Actually Succeeding
Because of the way The Former Guy handled his election loss right after November 2020, including telling his own supporters to skip the upcoming elections for senator in Georgia, the Democrats were able to gain two Senate seats in Georgia, nominally giving Biden a 50-50 Senate with the tie-breaking vote being held by Vice-President Kamala Harris.
But things haven’t exactly worked out that way, particularly because two of the Senate Democrats are holding up the desires of the other 48, and also especially because of the filibuster.
And let us not forget the continuation of the “Big Lie” and the fact that the majority of the Republican Party has devolved into an authoritarian cesspool best defined by the current DNC chair Jaimie Harrison as the “party of fear and fascism.”
Nevertheless, in his first year in office, President Biden has had many successes. Let me count the ways:
He signed a $1.9 TRILLION COVID-relief bill in March 2021 that put cash in people’s pockets, gave BILLIONS to state and local governments, and extended supplemental unemployment benefits and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.
He signed a $1 TRILLION infrastructure bill in November 2021.
He signed about 75 executive orders, many of them advancing immigration goals and many more undoing the terrible EOs signed by The Former Guy, including the Muslim ban.
He won the confirmation of about 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan.
So far, he has not only strengthened our position with NATO but built and kept tight a unified NATO against the transgressions of Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.
He returned America to the Paris Climate Agreement and has made climate change and non-fossil fuels centerpieces of his administration.
Unfortunately, there are way too many people who forget that the Biden-Harris administration is just over one year old. They refuse to see the context of the environment in which Biden is operating, including a series of severe, simultaneous, and overlapping crises. In addition to climate change, racial justice and voting rights are still two of the biggest hurdles that must be resolved as quickly as possible.
Finally, presidential job approval numbers can often be more perception than reality, and it helps to put those numbers in context. The Former Guy’s numbers never reached 50%, and his lowest number was 29%. The lowest for the Bush presidents were 19% for Bush 43 and 29% for Bush 41. Joe’s lowest number so far has been 33%, but Barack once had a 37% rating. Harry Truman’s lowest rating was 22%, lower than Richard Nixon’s lowest at 23%. The presidents with the highest low numbers were Franklin Roosevelt at 48%, a tie with Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy at 56%!
So what I would like people to see and understand is that poll numbers are fluid and that Joe and Kamala are not doing as bad as people think.
Please let us know your thoughts in the comments.