‘Just colossally disrespectful” was how someone described as a “longtime Biden advisor” characterized for a Daily Beast reporter the behavior of Senator Kyrsten Sinema last week. The Arizona Democrat had told the Senate she wouldn’t support a proposal to suspend the filibuster, thereby dealing the long-expected fatal blow to President Biden’s legislative ambitions.
The adviser was presumably articulating a widespread frustration in the president’s ranks after Ms. Sinema declined even to hear any more pleas from Mr Biden before jilting him. But think about that outburst for a moment and consider what it says about the standing and authority of the 46th president as we mark the end of his first year in office.
Has there ever been a figure a year into his term reduced to such impotence that his aides are impelled to whine to friendly media about the “disrespect” shown him by a first-term senator? Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson’s acolytes doing that for him? Ronald Reagan’s ?
But such lèse-majesté is routine now in Democratic ranks. In the past month the president has been spurned by Ms Sinema, rebuffed by Senator Joe Manchin, and, perhaps most humiliating, snubbed by Stacey Abrams, whose principal political achievement is to have come in second in the 2018 election for Georgia governor. Ms. Abrams decided she had a “scheduling” conflict when the president was in her patch last week.
As we survey the flattened landscape of Mr. Biden’s ambitions at the one-year mark, it’s for all of us, not just frazzled White House staff to ask: What now?
The answer is obvious: He should do what he should have done a year ago. A little wisdom, some prudence and a grasp of elementary congressional arithmetic might have guided him to make genuine progress for an exhausted and fractured nation. Instead of trying to build ever more improbable progressive utopias in the clouds on the vaporous platform of a 50-50 Senate, he could have started—and could even now—start doing some of the things the American people would actually like to see him do. He could take boring, practical measures to address real challenges—getting us past the pandemic, cooling inflation, addressing crime in the cities and the crisis at the border—not the imaginary ones that fester in the revolutionary’s mind.
But it’s going to be much harder now. A year ago he had the political capital of a newly elected president with an approval rating that approached 60%. Having largely squandered that capital, what does he do to persuade vulnerable politicians in his own party—let alone anyone else—that they should support the goals of a president with 40% approval?
Having spent a year steeping the American people in panicked rhetoric about the menace to democracy his opponents pose, culminating in that ludicrous exercise in performative paranoia in Georgia last week, how does he work with those enemies to achieve anything?
What does he say to the ghost of John Lewis the next time he encounters him wandering around the Capitol? “Sorry John, I couldn’t save the republic from totalitarianism with the voting rights bill we named for you, but I did manage to cut a deal with Jeff Davis, Bull Connor and George Wallace over there to cut tariffs on beef imports?”
Historians will have to figure out what exactly impelled Mr Biden to go for broke—and keep going, until he was duly broke—on the two main Democratic legislative plans of his first term: first, Build Back Better and now the so-called voting rights bills. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, we have more to worry about with the president’s health than memory lapses and verbal stumbles.
People who claim to know Mr Biden say that he was convinced by the blandishments of obsequious advisers that he was on a historic mission of transformation. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” they presumably whispered in the presidential ear, displaying that unsettling and peculiarly left-wing penchant for exploiting misery rather than fixing it.
Perhaps too we shouldn’t discount the effect on the man’s ego from eight years of being laughed at by the teenagers who carried Barack Obama’s BlackBerry around the West Wing. They alone can take some comfort in the thought that the past year may have vindicated their boss’s famous warning: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [foul] things up”
Still, look on the bright side. Thanks to Republican solidarity and the efforts of the shrunken but still barely breathing sensible wing of the Democratic Party, a damaged country has avoided further unnecessary self-inflicted harm. The repudiation of the left’s ambitions is a necessary and wholly welcome corrective that should help the U.S. to recover its equilibrium in a turbulent time.
And since the avoidance of calamity is the next best thing—and often an essential prelude—to success, let’s celebrate Mr. Biden’s anniversary as a moment of real promise.
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