President Joe Biden deserves better grades than he’s getting from public opinion polls.
Americans are quicker to blame presidents for what’s beyond their control than to praise them for what they accomplish. So it’s more a case of fate than fairness that Biden is being attacked for an inflation rate brought on by a pandemic that was raging worldwide before he took office.
That’s causing jitters on Wall Street, where big investors worry less about inflation than what the independent Federal Reserve might do about it. A substantial majority of Republicans still believes former President Donald Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen, which puts Biden at a disadvantage when pollsters ask how he’s doing.
Despite that, Biden’s economic record is impressive.
A record to run on
Since his inauguration, the unemployment rate fell at the fastest clip in history. A record 6 million new jobs were created last year.
The COVID-19 pandemic is no longer creating havoc at hospitals or piling up body bags in refrigerated trucks. Biden took charge of what his predecessor worked hard to ignore, and his masking and vaccination mandates saved lives.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief package and $1.2 billion infrastructure bill infused the economy at a critical moment and alleviated poverty for millions of children. It’s a record that even a Republican president would be proud to own.
All that is secondary, though, to the presidency’s supreme responsibility of protecting the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Perseverance and a steady hand
Biden inherited and repaired a foreign policy subverted by Trump’s affinity for authoritarians, his unconcealed contempt for NATO and his infatuation with the world’s most dangerous dictator, Vladimir Putin. The U.S. has regained respect as leader of the free world.
Biden’s career has been inspired by a belief that democracy under attack anywhere is imperiled everywhere. He rightly sees Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his war crimes there as the gravest threat to world security since Nazi Germany.
Reprising FDR’s vision of America as the “great arsenal of democracy,” Biden has successfully led much of the free world in arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia without letting Putin bait him into a direct conflict. But to the extent Putin perceives Biden as weak or unpopular, he has less incentive to call off his genocidal campaign or engage in serious negotiation.
It serves Putin’s diabolical ambitions to have Biden hobbled by a Republican Congress in 2023 and the country crippled by a second Trump presidency in 2025. Putin is well aware of Republican attacks on Biden’s credibility and doubtlessly has aided it with his media trolls. That unquestionably accounts for some of Biden’s high disapproval ratings.
So does the endless Republican campaign to disparage Biden’s election and presidency.
The big lie’s big effects
No new president — not even Abraham Lincoln — came into office in the face of such manufactured false doubt about the legitimacy of his election. But Trump made it plain that he would not accept the results if he lost.
The House select committee’s findings, already unfolding in federal court proceedings against his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, show that the White House and accomplices in Congress were planning a political coup in which the violence of Jan. 6, 2021 was just one element. That is now regarded as a dress rehearsal for 2024.
The scheme was to compel Vice President Mike Pence to throw out, rather than count, a critical mass of Biden’s electoral votes. When Pence refused, Trump explicitly called him out to the mob, putting his life in danger. The mounting evidence is that Meadows knew the mob would turn violent, and yet he let Trump incite the “walk” to the Capitol.
Even after that, 140 Republicans in Congress became accomplices in the attempted coup by voting to reject at least one of the two challenged Biden electoral slates.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott was one of them. Now Scott is running the GOP senatorial campaign, raising money with a radical right platform that threatens even Medicare and Social Security.
Republican propaganda has poisoned American politics. Nearly three-fourths of Republican voters disbelieve that Biden was fairly elected although there isn’t an iota of credible evidence to the contrary. It’s rare to find Republican politicians who have guts enough to simply admit that Biden’s presidency is legitimate.
All of this has a pernicious effect on public perceptions of the president and on his ability to get things done.
A House divided against itself
The exceedingly close division in Congress is another burden for Biden. It reinforces the Republican minority’s obsession with foiling the agenda of any Democratic president. The GOP has two potent allies in Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The rest of Biden’s agenda, from raising the minimum wage to protecting voting rights to fighting climate change, is frozen by Manchin’s head fakes about compromise.
Biden has done what he could by executive order, as in requiring $15 an hour wages for the federal work force and many of its contractors. But thanks to Manchin and the filibuster, the minimum wage remains at $7.25, where it has been since 2009, in states that haven’t raised it themselves. In real terms, it’s worth only $5.43 now.
No wonder the public is so sour about the economy. It goes deeper than the inflationary effects of the coronavirus on the supply chain and of Putin’s war on oil prices. The public sees the super-rich getting even richer, while the 99% are struggling with soaring housing costs and other price increases that Republicans only pretend to care about.
To fix that, Biden needs a responsive Congress. That means a Democratic Senate majority large enough to not depend on Manchin or Sinema and a House not led by Kevin McCarthy or someone worse. It’s the voters’ choice.
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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
