Which is worse: to be governed by a decent man who sees a country that no longer exists, or by a thug who sees it all to clearly and aims to extract from it every possible personal advantage? Cheery illusion-based optimism or clear-as-cut-glass reality? Stay with the former and the latter will prevail.
On January 19, 2022, President Biden held a press conference. He coherently cited his administration’s accomplishments. These include going “from 2 million people being vaccinated at the moment [he] was sworn in to 210 million Americans being fully vaccinated today”. Substantive and useful.
His exchanges with reporters were sensible, even if some of the questions were not. Refreshing was the absence of personal self-aggrandizement. The image was of a president committed to governing, and to doing so with the greater public good foremost in mind. A no-longer-listing ship came to mind.
Two comments, however, trigger alarm over his perception of the issues facing the country and the priorities he ascribes to them. His decades of experience in Washington seem more liability than asset. He exhibits the signs of someone trapped in views of a US that no longer exist.
He acknowledges that “there’s a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country”. But he insists that the “new enemy” is … Omicron. Without denigrating his administration’s work on the pandemic, he overlooks the traditional enemy that is far more dangerous to the country’s health.
The Republican Party is making the country ungovernable. It does this by opposing the Biden administration’s efforts to combat COVID. And by perverting the rules and mechanisms of voting to ensure Republican victories in all elections.
With 2022 mid-terms coming up fast and 2024 looming, one would have expected him to pound the bully pulpit on voting rights, starting January 21. How about in January 2022? Nope. “[T]he second challenge we’re facing [is] prices. COVID-19 has created a lot of economic complications.”
More disconcerting was his response to the question whether he had “overpromise[d]” to the public what he could achieve in his first year. “I did not anticipate … such a stalwart effort [by Republicans] to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”
This could only come from someone out of touch with the country’s political realities. Every legislative session since Republicans took Congress in 1994 has been obsessed with blocking whatever Democrats proposed. This is no secret. Republican leaders have repeatedly said this was their aim.
Nor was it a secret to then-Senator Biden. How is it possible that, three decades later, he remains unable to anticipate the lengths to which Republicans will go to undermine a Democratic president? Was he any place other than Washington during the Clinton and Obama administrations?
When asked if he needed to be “more realistic” and “scale down” his priorities, he said: “The American people overwhelmingly agree with me on prescription drugs. They overwhelmingly agree with me on the cost of education. They overwhelmingly agree with me on early education.”
Terrific, Joe. But if that’s the case, why is Congress not passing your legislation? And what do you intend to do about that? “We just have to make the case what we’re for and what the other team is not for. … [O]ne of the ways to do this is to make sure we make the contrast as clear as we can.”
When told his voting rights legislation wasn’t going anywhere, he said: “That’s true … [but] I’m confident that we can take the case to the [voters] that … they should [not] be voting for those … put up by the Republicans to determine that they’re going to be able to change the outcome.”
That word salad was followed by: “[T]he most important thing to do is try to inform — not educate — inform the public of what’s at stake, in stark terms, and let [it] make judgments and let [voters] know who’s for them and who’s against them.” Great; more marketing … from people unable to do it.
Not a hint of alarm. No presidential warning to the public that, in light of state-level efforts to skew the laws, there was a risk of disenfranchisement of Democratic voters. Republican-controlled state legislatures are granting themselves the unlimited power to decide who won an election.
“[A]ll I can say is I’m going to continue to make the case why it’s so important to not turn the electoral process over to political persons who are set up deliberately to change the outcome of elections. … [L]ook, maybe I’m just being too much of an optimist. … We had the highest voter turnout in history.”
The line between optimism and cluelessness is a fine one. But to have the country’s chief executive continue to see the current state of play — including, not least, January 6, 2021 — as just one more case of friendly competition between two political parties is willfully defying reality.
Even if he pays lip-service to it. “Mitch has been very clear he’s going to do anything to prevent Biden from being a success.” But then it’s instantly back to: “I get on with Mitch. I actually like Mitch McConnell.” Even if true, why publicly legitimize McConnell’s corruption of the polity?
What leads someone from, “[McConnell] has one straightforward objective: make sure that there’s nothing I do that makes me look good in the [public’s] mind,” to “we like each other?” The president, a politician through and through, refuses to accept the fact that McConnell will cut his throat.
Even when he acknowledges the issue, “Why didn’t Biden push the [voting rights] as hard as he pushed it the last month? Why didn’t he push it six months ago as hard as he did now?”, his response is to blame “timing that is not of one’s choice … I have not been out in the community nearly enough.”
He is convinced that if he can just “connect with people, let them take a measure of my sincerity, let them take a measure of who I am,” Republicans in the Senate — hardly known for prioritizing voters over donors — will vote for his legislation, their publicly stated intentions notwithstanding.
He blames himself for “not communicating as much as [he] should have”. Good grief. A generation ago his exercises in persuasiveness might have worked on Republicans. It’s pure hallucination for him, in 2022 and at the threshold of losing Congress to insurrectionists, to continue to believe it.
