Will it fall to the First Lady to say ‘time’s up’ for Joe Biden?
With 700,000 Covid deaths, 4.2 per cent inflation, a murder spike, immigration chaos and gridlock on Capitol Hill, buyer’s remorse has set in for American voters.
If Joe Biden’s recent slide in the polls continues, is there a way for the Democrats to dump the president as their party’s nominee in 2024, or are they stuck with him?
American voters put their trust in Biden when he was campaigning from his basement at the height of the pandemic and Donald Trump was on the ballot. Now that Biden is in the White House, however, buyer’s remorse has set in. This has not come as a total surprise: most presidents suffer an early slump in their approval ratings.
Like his predecessors, Biden is facing challenges over which he has limited control, including a once-in-a-century global health disaster, a surging migrant crisis that has frustrated presidents for decades and, as last week highlighted, a Democratic Party that refuses to put aside its differences to secure his legislative agenda.
Yet Biden’s own mishaps are also alienating voters, as those who know him well might have predicted.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” Barack Obama once reportedly said of his former vice-president.
The humiliating American exodus from Afghanistan in August led to a perfect “X” in the opinion polls, marking the spot on the graph where the plunging numbers of people who approved of Biden’s performance crossed with soaring disapproval ratings. With 700,000 deaths from Covid-19, inflation at 4.2 per cent, a murder spike, immigration chaos and gridlock on Capitol Hill, the nation’s breezy confidence of early summer has given way to autumnal gloom.
It is not easy to deter a sitting president from running for a second term. Larry Sabato, the director of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia, thinks it will fall to the first lady to deliver the bad news if her husband continues to underperform. Nobody else would dare to tell Biden his time was up.
The last president to choose not to seek re-election was Lyndon Johnson, who backed out of the 1968 race having lost his grip on public opinion because of the Vietnam War. His wife, Lady Bird, was one of the few people he consulted before he made his shock decision public - and their marriage, strained by LBJ’s affairs, was not as strong as that of Jill and Joe Biden.
“Joe Biden wants to run again in 2024 but he will be 82 that year,” Sabato said. “He doesn’t look that healthy now. I think Jill Biden will have to tell him to pack it in. She has tremendous influence and he trusts her more than anything. They have had a wonderful marriage for decades.”
Sabato acknowledges that his prediction may be premature, as the proud and stubborn Biden has no obvious successor (vice-president Kamala Harris would face a host of primary challengers). Yet a series of policy blunders are sowing panic among those who fear Trump won’t have to “steal” the next election to retake the White House.
Last week Nate Cohn, the polling guru for The New York Times, reported that support for Biden is sliding dangerously among the groups the Democrats depend on to win elections: 18 to 34-year-olds, women, and black and Latino voters. An Associated Press poll on Friday found that support among independents had dropped from 62 per cent in July to 38 per cent in September.
Have Americans woken up to the fact that they never loved Biden as a candidate in the first place?
In 2020, he barely scraped through the first primaries and it looked as if the far-left Bernie Sanders would secure the Democratic nomination. A similar fear of extremism carried Biden all the way to a narrow victory over Trump.
As president, Biden’s shortcomings are all too obvious. The debacles in Afghanistan and on the Mexican border have deep roots, but the chaos of recent weeks stems directly from his reckless and incompetent decision-making.
Biden is presiding over a deeply riven nation. He was hired partly to act as healer-in-chief and his biggest broken promise has been the failure to unite the country - even in the face of Trump’s rampant lies about electoral fraud. That makes any rematch between the pair fraught with peril.
What Sabato describes as “deep, wide and dangerous divides” have set alarm bells ringing. In a recent essay for The Washington Post, Robert Kagan, a former Republican and fellow of the Brookings Institution, warned that Trump - a “charismatic authoritarian” - should not be underestimated.
“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves,” he wrote.
With Trump circling ominously, Kagan argued that moderate Republicans such as Mitt Romney, the senator for Utah and former 2012 presidential candidate, should help to shore up Biden in Congress. Yet if bickering Democrats can’t unite behind their president, it is a tall order for Republicans to come to his rescue.
Whether Biden’s superpower - not being Trump - can work again in three years’ time is far from clear.
A former close associate groaned: “His weaknesses have really been unmasked. He’s not the man he touted himself as being - a foreign policy expert and someone who could get business done in Congress.”
On Friday, Biden went to Capitol Hill to try and persuade moderate and left-wing Democrats to stop feuding and pass his dollars 1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, opening the way for huge spending on roads, railways, bridges and high-speed internet. If he had been Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet in the TV series The West Wing, striding to the Hill, perhaps the gambit would have worked. As it was, the real-life president returned to the White House empty-handed.
Biden bought himself some time, but not a deal. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s in six minutes, in six days or six weeks, we’re going to get it done,” he said. My sources tell me it could take until late autumn or even 2022 to pass the legislation.
The left won’t back the infrastructure deal until there is agreement on the heart of Biden’s agenda - the $US3.5 trillion “build back better” bill, which includes spending on social policy and climate change.
For better or worse, the scale of such social investment would transform the government’s relationship with its citizens, particularly the most disadvantaged ones. Polls show that the plans have broad support among voters. If passed, they would secure Biden’s legacy.
But the president has so far failed to win over “Manchema” - Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two Democratic senators on the right of the party who believe that pump-priming on this scale is irresponsible and inflationary.
Nothing can pass the 50-50 divided Senate without their agreement. It remains to be seen if either side will countenance Biden’s compromise offer to lower the price tag to about dollars 2.3 trillion. The cost of failure could be catastrophic for the Democrats.
Biden warned his colleagues in Congress that their bickering could bring back Trump. Defeat would embolden the same forces who backed the Capitol Hill insurrectionists in January, he said.
Sabato’s Centre for Politics released a poll last week showing support rising for the secession of Republican “red” states or Democratic “blue” states. More than half of Trump voters (52 per cent) and one in four Biden voters (41 per cent) agreed at least “somewhat” that it was time to split the country. A quarter of Trump voters “strongly” agreed.
It is possible the electorate will rally to Biden again to keep Trump out. He believes it is his mission to save democracy from his predecessor’s clutches - and tends to share Trump’s view that “I alone can fix it”. But the 2022 midterm elections are looming fast.
If the Democrats lose their majority, Biden will be a hobbled president. At that point, Jill Biden could be called upon to make a tough decision.
The Sunday Times
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