Inflation hit its worst mark in four decades. The border is the worst it’s been in modern history. And the U.S. now finds itself entangled in two wars.
For a man who vowed to bring stability to the White House after four years of Trumpian tumult, President Biden is facing a staggering number of crises, testing his ability to deliver on the quiet competence he promised.
His supporters say he has been unfathomably unlucky, buffeted by global events that would have challenged anyone in office. Opponents say the crises are his own making, the result of foreign and domestic policy blunders he could have avoided.
Whatever the cause, the political danger for Mr. Biden is clear: Voters need to see him figure some of this out, and quickly.
“Biden is suffering from an image that he’s too old for the job and he has to overcome these crises to prove he is able to do the job,” said Todd Belt, director of the Political Management Program at George Washington University.
Mr. Biden, who suffers criticism from some inside his own administration and Democrats at large for his unabashed support for Israel, has been working through a rocky time dealing with the Jewish nation’s war with Hamas, though the administration was instrumental in winning the release of 81 of about 240 hostages held in Gaza.
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Multiple polls have shown Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump in a rematch, including polling in critical states.
Increasingly, those polls are finding Americans uncertain about the leadership Mr. Biden can deliver.
A national CNN survey this month found 72% said things are going poorly in the U.S. and abroad, and just 25% thought the 80-year-old Mr. Biden can handle his job. And less than a third of respondents in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said Mr. Biden has “the competence to carry out the job of the president.”
‘Snakebitten’
Mr. Biden has been caught off guard by crises both large and small.
He initially dismissed inflation as “transitory,” forcing the White House to scramble as it approached a 40-year high in 2022.
In his first press conference in March 2021, as the southern border spiraled out of control, he insisted the numbers were seasonal and “happened every year.” Now, after roughly 10 million illegal entries during his term, his team acknowledges it’s bad, but says the problem is global and other countries have it even worse.
The White House was slow to recognize the infant formula shortage last year, with Mr. Biden declaring that he didn’t think anyone anticipated it. He then embarrassingly conceded that executives had warned the administration in February that there would be supply issues because Abbott shuttered its Michigan formula plant.
One week before Hamas’ terror attack on Israel, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan declared the Middle East “quieter than it has been in two decades.”
The list of problems and missteps can easily overshadow what has gone right for the president.
He took office amid a once-in-a-century pandemic that was killing 20,000 people a week in January 2021. That figure now hovers at about 1,000.
Mr. Biden has forged an international coalition to help prop up Ukraine, a country of roughly 40 million, against the onslaught of Vladimir Putin and Russia, with its 140 million population and massive war machine.
Meanwhile, the official jobless rate remains near historic lows and the economy is shockingly strong, defying experts who a year ago had said there was a 100% chance of a recession by October 2023.
Mr. Biden’s defenders can’t understand why the public isn’t rewarding those kinds of numbers.
Inflation in October eased to 3.2% and the U.S. has, so far, avoided a recession while increasing GDP by 1.9% on Mr. Biden’s watch.
“For whatever reason, he doesn’t seem to get the credit for his remarkable economic success,” said Chris Whipple, who has authored books on the Biden administration. “Biden has created millions of jobs — lowest unemployment in generations, lowest Black unemployment — you could go on and on. It is a mystery that he doesn’t get enough credit.”
The fact is, some presidents just seem snakebitten.
Take President George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq figuring Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons — an opinion most experts shared at the time — only to discover Saddam had quietly ditched the program. Mr. Bush then ended his two terms with a spectacular financial collapse that spawned the Great Recession.
Analysts also saw comparisons between Mr. Biden and President Carter, who had to deal with soaring inflation, higher gas prices, crime fears and even a Russian invasion of a neighboring country.
“Jimmy Carter is a great comparison,” said Allan Stam, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. “Both came into office with a worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with the adversaries the U.S. is facing.”
Mr. Whipple saw parallels between Mr. Biden and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Also a Democrat, Mr. Roosevelt came into office amid the Great Depression and then faced a world teetering toward global war.
“Biden came into office with the most daunting array of challenges since FDR,” he said. “You have to wonder once in a while if life isn’t fair to Democratic presidents.”
Who’s to blame
While it might seem Mr. Biden is “cursed,” his defenders say a closer look shows none of the crises should be laid at his feet.
“When the economy comes back from a near-death experience, inflation is inevitable. The border has been an intractable problem for decades, Biden’s doing an extraordinary job rallying NATO in Ukraine and has been pitch perfect and morally clear in the case of Israel and Hamas,” Mr. Whipple said. “Biden didn’t bring these problems on himself and he’s done an extraordinary job dealing with them.”
Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s research arm, disagreed. He said the administration’s problems are caused by an effort to cater to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. He said nearly every issue from inflation to the crisis in the Middle East to runaway federal debt can be traced back to a liberal ideology.
“All of these crises are interconnected and it’s all in pursuit of a far-left agenda,” he said. “If you look at the government spending it’s directly tied to inflation and the withdrawal from Afghanistan has had repercussions in Ukraine and Israel because we looked weak.”
Mr. Biden also has been trapped by his determination to erase anything Mr. Trump touched.
That’s particularly true at the southern border, where the Biden team inherited the quietest border in a half-century and a series of get-tough policies from its predecessor. It quickly unwound the get-tough policies, and the result was record chaos.
Nearly every yardstick has become worse, from terrorism suspects to fentanyl smuggling to illegal immigrant crossings. Some 240,000 illegal immigrants were detected at the southern border in September, or three times the rate of December 2020, the last full month under Mr. Trump.
Although almost all of those caught in 2020 were pushed back across the border, most of those encountered under Mr. Biden are being released into American communities.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently told a Senate hearing that the world is facing a migration crisis and the U.S. is just seeing what everybody else is. He also said Congress, not Mr. Biden, deserves blame for a “broken” U.S. system unable to cope.
Sen. Mitt Romney said that explanation is tough to square with the numbers, which showed the border breakdown beginning when Mr. Biden became president.
“The key factor that’s changed here is your administration,” the Utah Republican said.
Or take the president’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. It ushered in the Taliban’s takeover, the death of 13 Americans in a suicide bombing and a chaotic airlift that rescued the wrong people, spiriting tens of thousands of people off the streets of Kabul while leaving behind tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to help the American military over the last 20 years.
The University of Virginia’s Mr. Stam said Mr. Putin saw weakness and that emboldened Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the emerging bloc of U.S. adversaries.
“One of the things the war in Ukraine has done is bring together — out of necessity — Iran, Russia, North Korea and China in terms of economics and sharing security,” he said. “Once the avalanche begins, it’s really hard to stop it and they tend to get bigger the further down the hill they go.”
Mr. Biden’s critics say his actions weren’t strong enough to dissuade Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine. Mr. Biden quickly imposed economic sanctions on Moscow, but they have done little to slow down Russia’s war machine. Instead, Mr. Putin has turned to North Korea for weapons and a trading partner.
They also say Mr. Biden was too quick to publicly rule out U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine, signaling to Mr. Putin there would be little resistance to his incursion.
Others argue Mr. Putin had been determined to take Ukraine before Mr. Biden took office. They give Mr. Biden high marks for helping wean European economies off Russian oil and holding together the NATO alliance to discourage Russian aggression elsewhere in Europe. The money and weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine have helped the country fend off the invaders longer than most experts predicted.
“He’s handled Ukraine really well. He rallied our allies in Ukraine and worked to get grain flowing again into Ukraine,” said Mr. Belt of George Washington University. “Putin didn’t count on that. Putin thought the war would be over last winter and it wasn’t.”
Gridlock in Congress hasn’t helped Mr. Biden.
“There was a period years ago where Congress was able to carry the load for the president on some of these issues but because Congress can’t get out of its own way, the burden is failing nearly entirely on the executive branch,” Mr. Stam said. “That has made these situations worse.”
For Mr. Biden, the big question now is whether voters will take their frustrations out on him in November 2024.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.