Did Biden peak on Inauguration Day?

Joe and Jill Biden walk to Marine One. Picture: Getty Images.

During the Chicago Cubs’ long century of futility, the old joke was that every year they peaked on Opening Day. Is it too early to wonder if Joe Biden’s presidency did the same thing?

The inauguration promise to bring healing to a fractured nation didn’t last the short ride back down Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20. But what of the real Biden project that was revealed once the festivities ended: the transformation of America into a land of equity and inclusion, one that Michelle Obama could finally be proud of, that Bernie Sanders could count as Cuba’s equal, and where LeBron James could feel safe and fairly rewarded?

True, it’s no longer Opening Day, but we haven’t reached the All-Star break and already reality has bitten the geniuses in this White House harder than old Major the German shepherd did. Unlike Major, this fickle beast can’t be safely dispatched from the executive mansion and forgotten about. It has a painful way of telling you what happens when you construct an ideological dreamscape made up of impossible promises, implausible assertions and dishonest propositions.

Last week reminded us on multiple fronts that trying to govern on a prospectus of large claims at odds with the defiant reality is a perilous mission.

Tourists, some in face masks while others are not, visit the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Picture: AFP.

The sudden change in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask advice has undermined the administration’s claim to be governed at all times by data and facts. It has revealed to a wider audience what some of us knew all along: that pious claims about “following the science” were as flimsy as a cloth face covering. We’d been told for four months that vaccinations don’t necessarily protect against viral transmission. The CDC’s director warned a few weeks ago about “impending doom.” The president said “neanderthal thinking” drove governors to lift mandates. Suddenly, everything has changed — except for federal mask mandates, which officials began to ease only on Monday.

But with the Biden administration leading from behind, many states and businesses relaxed or abolished their mask rules. That prompted dismay by many of the president’s most loyal supporters. They took to TV studios and social media to bewail the betrayal. The mask had been the most joylessly visible way of signalling one’s virtue since sackcloth and ashes. Now it will be easier to tell the righteous from the deplorable, but millions will stray from the path of redemption.

The crisis in the Middle East is another unwelcome intrusion of reality into the wonder world of Democratic progressivism.

Leftist Democrats, whose demands the president has so dutifully followed so far, don’t like Israel. They see the Palestinian cause as an extension of the equity and racial-justice objectives they’re busy pursuing at home.

The dwindling reality-based community inside the Biden administration knows better and can’t yet abandon the logic that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas rockets. But with a progressive wing to please, an Iran deal back at the heart of their foreign-policy objectives, and an Israel-hostile international “community” to appease, they’re in a deepening hole that threatens their wider Middle East aspirations.

The most explosive collision with reality is in economics. It’s hard to recall a week of official data that more directly challenged the entire governing premise of a fledgling administration than what arrived in early May.

Joe Biden waves steps off Marine One in Washington. Picture: AFP.

The sharp slowdown in job growth, uptick in unemployment, and biggest leap in retail prices in more than a decade was a reminder about the immutability of certain economic truths.

It was only a month’s worth of data; we’d need more evidence before declaring an emergency. But plenty of intelligent people have been warning that this could happen if you committed to multiple spending binges in an economy as unpredictably disrupted as the post-pandemic one.

Supply bottlenecks have been driving up prices, and with the economy reopening employers are desperate for workers. Being paid to stay home is proving to have predictable consequences for the availability of labour. All this may or may not be “transitory” as the Fed insists it is.

But perhaps most worrying and suggestive of stagflation is a growing mismatch between the pool of available labour and the demand for it. Companies have shed millions of jobs in the last year — and many improved their profitability. They will be slow to return to their old payrolls if they ever do. Demographic trends are also stagflationary — with fewer working-age Americans available to support the growing proportion of the population less likely to work.

That raises the risk that the economy may be shifting to a higher unemployment rate consistent with a sustainable growth rate. The nightmare for Mr. Biden, as we saw in the 1960s and 1970s, is that the harder he presses the fiscal accelerator, the more the effect is felt in prices and not in real demand.

Last time it took more than a decade of wrenching monetary punishment to squeeze inflation out of the system. It’s not only Joe Biden who doesn’t have that long.

The Times