Why is Biden Struggling? Because America is Broken
My latest in the New York Times
I have a lengthy essay in this morning’s New York Times in which I try to do some deeper thinking about why President Joe Biden is struggling so badly in the polls against former President Donald Trump. No, it’s not just the president’s age. It’s that three in four Americans are dissatisfied about the way things are going in the United States. Why?
The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.
That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken. That’s no doubt why angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our politics over the past decade — with Mr. Trump, a political outsider, taking over the Republican Party in 2016 by running against the elites of both parties, and Senator Bernie Sanders giving the establishment favorite Hillary Clinton a run for her money that same year by taking on the banking and finance sectors of the economy, along with their Democratic and Republican enablers.
Mr. Biden has never been that kind of politician. Most of the time he speaks and acts as if he thinks American institutions are doing perfectly fine — at least so long as Mr. Trump doesn’t get his hands on them. Part of that is undoubtedly because Mr. Biden is an incumbent, and incumbents always find themselves having to defend what they’ve done in office, which isn’t compatible with acting like an insurgent going to war against the system.
Then there’s the fact that Mr. Biden has worked within our elected institutions since the Nixon administration, making him deeply invested in them (and implicated in their failures). Finally, as a Democrat who came of age during the heyday of mid-20th-century liberalism, Mr. Biden is wedded to the idea of using a functional, competent and capable federal government to improve people’s lives — whether or not more recent history validates that faith.
This places him badly out of step with the national mood, speaking a language very far removed from the talk of a broken country that suffuses Mr. Trump’s meandering and often unhinged remarks on the subject. The more earnest statements of third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein also speak to aspects of our brokenness, taking ample and often nostalgic note of what’s gone wrong and promising bold, if vague, action to begin an effort of repair.
That leaves Mr. Biden as the lone institutionalist defender of the status quo surrounded by a small army of brokenists looking for support from an electorate primed to respond to their more downcast message.
I hope you’ll take advantage of following this gift link that will allow you to read the whole piece for free. That will get you more of the analysis, as well as several paragraphs in which I propose a number of ways Biden could shift his message in order to do a better job of meeting the voters where they are.
OK, as far as it goes, but nothing about anti-trust? Why not also point out that Biden is the best president in more than 50 years in going after the combinations, and junk fees imposed by crooks, and introduce Ms. Khan to the voting public, who is the best presidential appointee we have seen in a very, very long time? Even some of our most deplorable representatives, like Hawley, acknowledge the excellent job she has done. Best Washington bureaucrat since Pecora. Its to the point where many of the crooked monied interests who gave us Bill Clinton are now silently backing Trump. The money guys, who have made such a mess of the health care industry and pharmacies, amongst many others, should be one of Biden's targets, in the manner of Truman's Do Nothing Congress. Breaking up Google is becoming bi partisan, and its populist.
Parenthetically, speaking of Truman, to call this Congress 'Do Nothing' would be a flowery compliment. There are no shortage of rhetorical targets for Biden's re-election, no shortage of people at whom to "give em' hell.".
As a tangent, I don't totally buy into the foreign affairs part. I would contend that the number of votes driven by the incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan are minuscule, unless your family was so unfortunate as to lose a family member in that disgraceful affair. Of course, we now have had several years where no American has been wounded or killed for absolutely nothing. I for one will not apologize for Afghanistan; I voted for Gore and Kerry, and despised Junior, who was obviously asleep at the switch on 9-11 and then compounded his folly. While Biden is expected to apologize for everything that has happened since he first took the train to Washington, a lot of the other people who were actually responsible for the two Stupid Wars -- which were arguably prep for the Trump catastrophe ---are getting off scot free. Why does that make sense? I would suggest that at this point almost no voters particularly care about the botched exit from Afghanistan, and many of the ones who do, probably think we should have stayed the course until final victory, maybe on the Thirtieth Anniversary.
But so many of the people i love reading at the Bulwark, and whom I actually admire, can't bring themselves to admit what a disgrace the whole thing was, and its not surprising, since they work for Bill Kristol [who i also like to read]. I get it; I once had a boss too.
While the problems you cite are present, they are ever-present, in one form or another. What would be irrational would be to conclude that such problems push thoughtful citizens into voting for an unbridled, unfit candidate like Trump, instead of a devoted candidate like Biden, who speaks plainly and with conviction to traditional American values of unity, equality and civic cooperation. This is not time to Chicken Little our way into unwarranted states of anxiety and exasperation. It is a time to get out the vote in Swing states and for stirring rhetoric from those privileged to publish editorials in an august defender of representative Republic like the New York Times.