In what counts as the longest press conference in presidential history, President Joe Biden spent nearly two hours Wednesday defending his first year in office. But the very first question neatly summed up the problem that Democrats face ahead of what’s set to be a punishing midterm election race: “Did you overpromise to the American public what you could achieve in your first year in office?”
Biden did his best in his answers to balance between optimism and realism. Neither really landed. His hopes for success and his acknowledgment of the limitations he facescanceled each other out. The net effect is that while Democrats have been struggling with a Sisyphean set of demands, it looks from the outside like they spent most of the last year spinning their wheels.
That’s reflected in the polling, which is pretty dire for Biden. “More Americans disapprove than approve of how Biden is handling his job as president, 56 percent to 43 percent,” The Associated Press wrote of its most recent poll with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “As of now, just 28 percent of Americans say they want Biden to run for reelection in 2024, including only 48 percent of Democrats.” The level of unhappiness with both Biden and the country’s direction led NBC’s "Meet the Press" to predict a “shellacking” for Democrats later this year.
Democrats did promise a lot in the early days of the administration — as they should have. The list of policies that have been put on the back burner or stymied through obstruction over the last two decades is massive. Democrats have at one time or another promised to tackle all of them, including, but not limited to: increasing the amount of affordable housing available; providing relief from student loans; lowering the costs of child care and providing paid family leave; raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to shrink the wealth gap; reining in brutal police forces; and strengthening labor laws and unions. None of those have come to pass, or even moved forward, since Biden’s inauguration.
If you look back at past administrations, it’s clear that first-year jitters are real. It takes time for even a team filled with veterans who’ve served in past administrations to learn how to work the federal government’s levers of power. But history shows that moving fast is key for modern presidents. And his administration despite claiming that it had learned its lesson from the struggles of the Obama era about the narrow window available to actually govern, that hasn’t exactly panned out. Meanwhile, worries about the omicron variant and inflation have blunted the impact of Biden’s list of successes to date.
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