Joe Biden’s popularity with the American public continues to decline, per FiveThirtyEight:
To be clear, Biden wasn’t very popular to begin with. On Inauguration Day, only 53% of us approved, while 36% disapproved (leaving about 11 percent withholding judgement, which seems prudent now). That figure was at or below nearly every president since Harry S Truman, and only significantly higher than The Former Guy.
His current 42.9% number is similarly higher than few recent presidents after 286 days in office. (Trump had the worst number at only 38% approval, with Gerald Ford – who admittedly had a lot working against him, especially after pardoning Nixon – only slightly higher at 38.4%.)
What’s causing this erosion in popularity? Has he been charging the federal government millions of dollars to have international visitors, lobbyists, and staff stay at his hotels and golf courses? Nope. Has he been insulting minorities and our allies? Again, no. Has he proposed wide-reaching, xenophobic “travel bans” aimed at members of a particular religion? Not that I’ve noticed.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t very enthusiastic about Biden to begin with. I’m old enough to remember when, during the 1988 presidential primary race, he was caught plagiarizing in a speech, and it later came out that he’d done the same thing in law school. Plagiarism is hardly a capital offense, but it does open up a question of overall honesty, and frankly, he’s never really recovered from that in my mind. I voted for him for the same reason I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016; he wasn’t Donald J. Trump. (I’m also old enough to remember that Trump has been a punchline for decades.)
Back in March, I wrote that if the Democrats weren’t able to move significant legislation through Congress in 2021, they’d pay for it in 2022:
If Democrats are unable to move significant legislation through both houses of Congress and to the president’s desk in the next two years, they will lose control of one or both houses. Republicans will be able to point at their inability to act, and they’ll be right. The time has come for bold action on the filibuster; if not eliminating it altogether, at least modifying it to require that those filibustering a bill actually hold the floor (and stopping all Senate business altogether while doing so), or perhaps reducing the number of votes required for cloture depending on how long the filibuster has gone on (60 for the first three hours, 58 for the next three, and so on). Democrats have the majority today. They should start acting like it.
Some of the president’s popularly decline is due to the relentless lying from the right-wing media, that mostly reaches those who already hated Biden because he wasn’t Trump. But some of that vitriol seeps onto the more independent-minded centrists who are malleable enough to be influenced against whoever the current president is based on the braying of media pundits.
But I think quite a bit of the decline is from Democrats themselves, who had great hopes for transformative work from a Congress that’s nominally controlled by their party. In return for that faith in November, they’ve gotten pretty much nothing. The filibuster allows Mitch McConnell and the Republican minority to dictate what can and what can’t be seriously considered in the Senate. And Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin get to be kingmakers by refusing to go along with the elimination, or even the modification, of the filibuster rules. I’m not even certain what they want anymore outside of being the center of attention.
Biden himself is such a creation of the Senate that I think he finds it hard to imagine changing the filibuster. So he hasn’t pushed very hard for that. It needs to be done, however, and soon. As the calendar flips into 2022, all of the congress critters will go into full-time re-election mode (as if they ever leave that mode anymore!) and nothing – or perhaps more accurately, less than nothing – will get done.
Al Gore said “The presidency is more than a popularity contest.” As a leader, when you do the right things, it may lose you popularity points, and it may take months or years for the positive outcomes of your actions to be reflected in people’s retroactive judgement of you. Some of us had hopes that Joe Biden could be the type of leader who could cajole his party to make the hard decisions needed to move us away from the Trump era. So far, those hopes have turned out to be hollow, and it’s reflected in the poll numbers.