If the polls are right and Raphael Warnock wins Tuesday’s Georgia Senate run-off election against Herschel Walker, it will put an exclamation point on the Democrats’ pyrrhic defeat in this year’s elections.
True, they lost the House and trailed the Republican Party in the national popular vote by a wide margin. But a net gain of one seat in the Senate (if Georgia does re-elect Mr. Warnock) and a loss of only 10 House seats — seven of which were accounted for by localised red waves in Florida and New York — is a strong midterm showing for an incumbent party.
A Senate gain would make 2022 the first time since 1962, when John F. Kennedy was in the White House, that the Democrats increased their seats in the Senate while their party holds the presidency. The net loss of 10 House seats would be the smallest retreat by the Democrats in the first midterm election of a presidency of their party since 1962. In the past century, the only other Democrat to have enjoyed similar first term electoral success was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Democrats’ net gain of two governorships beat the party’s performance even under FDR and JFK.
For the past two years Joe Biden has surrounded himself with advisers and “historians” who have told him he was up there with the greatest and most transformative Democratic presidents. (Roman emperors used to hire slaves to remind them after a great victory that they were mortal. Presidents hire servants who tell them they are gods.)
Conservatives have mostly laughed out loud at the suggestion that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. — a twice-failed presidential candidate, a senator without trace for 36 years, butt of jokes from President Obama’s staff for eight years, and a man elected from his basement in a crazy year with thin congressional margins — could possibly be considered an important historical figure.
Should they stop laughing now?
You’d expect Mr. Biden’s fans to think so. The word they’ve been putting about since the elections is that the president is a historic overachiever. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, offered a Thanksgiving menu of the president’s top accomplishments that Biden fans could wave at grumpy uncles.
But if for some reason you find yourself doubting the testimony of Mr. Klain, how about Newt Gingrich?
Last week the former House speaker wrote a short but widely followed blog post titled “Quit Underestimating President Biden.” He argued that despite the president’s evident weaknesses, he had pulled off an unexpectedly strong midterm showing after two years of success in getting legislation through a sharply divided Congress.
“The Biden team took an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the U.S. House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turned it into trillions of dollars in spending — and a series of radical bills.”
There’s no denying this record. But it’s worth noting that when Mr. Biden campaigned in 2020, he promised to be a uniting president, to heal a wounded and divided nation, and to seek bipartisan solutions to America’s biggest problems. Instead his legislative success is largely the result of acceding to the Bernie Sanders agenda.
But are we really going to do this? Is the Republican Party’s disappointing performance truly the result of Mr. Biden’s presidential greatness? Or is there something else at work benefiting Democrats and harming Republicans, which perhaps Mr. Gingrich doesn’t want to identify?
Republicans lost the 2020 election, and instead of learning the lessons of that defeat spent the next two years insisting they didn’t lose it and clinging to the man who had lost.
By fighting the last election rather than the pressing issues of the day, Republicans managed to look both irrelevant to the actual challenges of the day and like a threat to the democratic order.
That enabled Mr. Biden to keep the focus off himself and on his opponents — hardly a call to voters for a ringing endorsement of his presidential achievements, about which almost nothing was heard during the midterm campaign.
It’s true that low expectations are often a politician’s greatest source of success. But do we really believe the Republicans underperformed because they suddenly found themselves up against a historically significant political figure? Or might it be something on their own side that is the source of Joe Biden’s success? Are Republicans really going to avoid the elephant in their own room by pretending that Joe Biden is George Washington?
The Wall Street Journal
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