In the final debate of his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden pointed to the 220,000 Americans who had died from Covid-19 to condemn his opponent. “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president,” he said. “I will fix this. I will end this. I will make sure we have a plan.”
By the time of his inauguration speech on January 20 last year, the US death toll from the virus had risen to 400,000, which Biden pointed out was larger than the number of Americans killed in World War II. Once in office, he did what he had promised, imposing a mask mandate on transport and in public spaces that he said would save 100,000 lives. He signed a $US1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief and stimulus package and forced vaccination mandates on all large employers.
A year later, Biden’s great plan has failed. The US death toll from Covid-19 has reached 872,000, more than the number of US deaths in every war it has fought since the American Revolution of 1775, excluding the US Civil War.
Biden’s expectation that the virus could be tamed with firm application of uniform national regulation and lavish government spending was an example of the hubris that infects elite opinion. Where more grounded politicians would be content to respond to complex challenges by giving them their best shot, the political elite flatters itself it has the perfect plan to fix them once and for all. To say Biden’s first year in office is a disappointment is putting it politely. In the compendium of cliches that served as his inauguration speech, he portrayed himself as a healer of wounds, voice of reasonableness and terminator of pandemics. Having proved himself incapable of any of those things, social media’s censors have shifted into overdrive to defend his honour.
At the end of December, Facebook posted a fake-news flag against a post claiming that Biden “has the lowest approval rating of any president ever”. Not so, responded the adjudicators at Politifact. Biden’s 41 per cent approval rating in a December poll was far from unusual. The approval ratings of former presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and George W. Bush had all dipped lower. So there.
So far there has been little attempt by the sympathetic, pro-Democrat media to put a gloss on last week’s Quinnipiac University poll, which showed Biden’s approval had fallen to 33 per cent. Perhaps they have run out of excuses, or simply given up. Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has not used the power of office to chart his own course. Trump promised to drain the swamp at home and recover America’s dignity abroad. He did this despite the hostility of the media and contempt of the establishment.
Biden, by contrast, has been dragged along in the wake of others, principally ideologically driven Democrat intellectuals who are positively hostile to the interests of everyday Americans.
Biden, barring the twin medical miracles of a successful personality bypass operation and vertebral column transplant, is destined to emulate his predecessor as a one-term president. He and Trump share a failing that transcends their many differences: neither has been capable of pivoting towards the centre of political gravity, to find the sweet spot on the spectrum where a leader can satisfy supporters and notional opponents alike.
Polling in the US suggests people are becoming less concerned about Covid-19 and more concerned about personal economic security at a time when the rate of inflation has moved beyond the point where it could be dismissed as merely technical. The pandemic restrictions are not helping. As in Australia, the rigid, unbendable rules around testing and isolation have failed to keep up with the mutation of the virus into a fast-spreading but less deadly variant that requires a response more similar to flu.
Shortages of goods and inflated prices are breezily attributed to “supply chain issues” by the Biden administration, as if supply chain disruption was a curse from the gods. In truth, disruptions to supply seldom occur for reasons other than misplaced government intervention, such as restrictions on infected workers reporting to duty.
The punishing effects of the Democrats’ woke agenda on the lives of everyday people can be measured in the rising price of energy. The cumulative effect of woke policy decisions is making life hard for the poor in the anti-fracking haven of Boulder, Colorado, for instance, where January temperatures hover around zero. Boulder’s Democrat administration put a moratorium on fracking and filed a lawsuit in 2018 against ExxonMobil and Suncor seeking “damages related to climate change”. Last month, the city’s website warned that residential natural gas bills are expected to increase this year by 37 per cent over last winter and offered hints to keep costs down, including lowering the thermostat, washing clothes in cold water and dressing in layers.
For Biden, rising energy prices are no reason to rethink his pro-renewable policy. Late last year he told the Glasgow climate summit rising prices should “reinforce the urgent need to diversify sources, double down on clean-energy deployment and adapt promising new clean-energy technologies”. His multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better program was the vehicle to pursue this grand ambition until it was scuppered by Senator Joe Manchin, one of the few current Democrat legislators willing to acknowledge the pitfalls of government central planning. “I have always said, ‘If I can’t go back home and explain it, I can’t vote for it’,” he said in December. “Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia.”
Biden’s dealings with Manchin have lacked the humility that would lead a wiser president to trade compromises in the belief four-fifths of something is more than five-fifths of nothing at all.
In doing so, Biden has sown the seeds of his own downfall and hastened the transformation of his own party away from its blue-collar roots to become the political arm of the woke elite.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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