Yesterday, the NY Times’ right-wing columnist Ross Douthat, asked why Biden is so unpopular. He should have asked why it was that as unpopular a figure as Biden has always been, could have ever become president in the first place? Every time— half a dozen times— he tied in the past he was a footnote. And he was on his way to being a footnote again before the Democratic establishment realized Bernie was going to win and stepped in to rig the nominating process for Biden, who basically went from 5th place to first place in a week, thanks to Obama’s backroom interference.
But Douthat is hardly going to write a column chastising Biden for having spent a mostly conservative career in the Senate as a corporate tool. He just noted that he’s an unpopular president, which he certainly is. He’s notes unpopular as Trump, but no one much likes him.
Douthat noted that Trump and Obama were both unpopular at this point in their presidencies, Trump because bad approval ratings were part of his thing from day one and Obama because of high unemployment and “the bruising battles over ObamaCare.” But Douthat’s analysis is a garden variety conservative way of looking at the Biden presidency: “there was a normal honeymoon, months of reasonably high approval ratings that ended only with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And since then, it’s been hard to distill a singular explanation for what’s kept his numbers lousy. The economy is better than in Obama’s first term, inflation is ebbing, and the feared recession hasn’t materialized. The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden’s foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way. This has created mystification among Democratic partisans as to why all this isn’t enough to give the president a decent polling lead. I don’t share that mystification. But I do think there’s real uncertainty about which of the forces dragging on Biden’s approval ratings matter most.”
Here’s the right-wing perspective— which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily completely wrong— the partisan realignment: “maybe,” he wrote, “it’s not just the economy. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend.” OK, that’s fair enough. But then Douthat went off the track into far right never-never land: “This raises the possibility that there’s a social-issues undertow for Democrats…” Maybe a possibility. But maybe a possibility of half a dozen other things. Douthat wrote some nonsense about how “even when wokeness isn’t front and center, the fact that the party’s activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the GOP— much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.”
There’s no question that there’s a partisan realignment, mostly based on educational attainment. Uneducated people have drifted towards the MAGAfied GOP and people with more education, and possibly higher IQs, have gravitated towards the Democrats. Because of pronounced MAGA racism and xenophobia, this realignment has been less apparent among Blacks and Hispanics. It still is.
Douthat thinks that for Biden to staunch the tide, he needs to pick triangulation fights with the left, the way Bill Clinton did.
He also points to another right-wing truism: “Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there’s just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage. In which case a different leader with the same policies might be more popular. Lacking any way to elevate such a leader, however, all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.
The hardest problem for the incumbent to address may be the pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.
I don’t see any obvious way for Biden to address this issue through normal presidential positioning. I would not recommend updating Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech with the therapy-speak of contemporary progressivism. I also don’t think the president is suited to be a crusader against digital derangement or a herald of religious revival.
Biden got elected, in part, by casting himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a more youthful and optimistic future. Now he needs some general belief in that brighter future to help carry him to re-election.
But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself.
Last week, Joe Klein noted that for Biden Trump “may be enough to win, but I’m sensing— or maybe it’s just me feeling this— a growing frustration among Democrats. A growing desire for…energy. Biden is a ghost of what the country needs right now.” He had indeed “done what he said he would. He’s been a solid ‘transitional’ President, but transition requires transit, a second act. We need to transition to something, a new Democratic vision of America— or to someone who can plausibly promise a creative way out of this molasses stasis. But Democrats are paralyzed. They’re terrified that a real conversation, a real political contest, will result in chaos— that Biden will collapse under pressure and there won’t be anyone credible to replace him… But it’s the wrong concern. Democrats really should be terrified by the opposite: that nothing will change between now and [the] election, except Joe Biden will get older.”