For most of President Joe Biden’s tenure, Fox News’s Peter Doocy has played the role of pressroom scourge. A barbed question so nettled Biden back in January that the President was caught on a live microphone calling him a “stupid son of a bitch,” for which he quickly called Doocy to apologize. That specific query is the same one that still haunts Biden’s Presidency and his party today: “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?” The answer, then and now, can be nothing other than the blindingly obvious: yes.
On Wednesday, Biden got into another brief scrap with Doocy, at the tail end of a White House photo opportunity. With less than three weeks to go before the midterm elections, the President was signing an order to release fifteen million more barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “It’s not politically motivated at all,” Biden insisted, though even the most diehard Democrat would have a hard time seeing the move as anything other than a last-ditch effort to stop gas prices at the pump from rising further before the vote. Republicans were quick to pounce: Was this the kind of strategic use for which the stockpile was intended?
As Biden stood to leave, Doocy shouted a question. “Top domestic issue: Inflation or abortion?” he asked.
“They’re all important. Unlike you, there’s no one thing,” Biden retorted. “We oughta be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
The Walk-and-Chew-Gum President seems to think this is as good of an approach as any other to carry into the midterms. On Monday, Biden devoted his sole public appearance of the day to touting a new federal Web site that’s accepting applications for student-loan forgiveness. “A game changer for millions of Americans,” he promised. On Tuesday, it was abortion rights, and a vow to push for a congressional bill to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law next year, should Democrats win sufficient majorities in Congress to pass it. (That’s a big if.) Wednesday was the Strategic Petroleum Reserve event.
On Thursday, Biden’s line of the day was infrastructure. He travelled to Pennsylvania, the setting of one of the country’s most hotly contested Senate races, to tout the “once-in-a-generation investment” from the bipartisan, trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by Congress and signed by Biden last year. To do so, he appeared at the site of the Fern Hollow Bridge, in Pittsburgh, which had dramatically collapsed on a day in January that Biden had been scheduled to visit the city—a visible reminder of the cratering infrastructure which the President hoped to fix. “America’s the only country in the world that comes out of crises stronger than we went into the crisis,” the President insisted, pointing out that Pennsylvania has already received more than five billion dollars from the infrastructure bill this year, and that repairs to the Fern Hollow Bridge would be done by Christmas. “I’m coming back to walk over this sucker!” Biden promised. He is still, no matter the odds piling up against him and his party, a professional optimist.
This was American politics as it used to be, more pork barrel than culture war, and the senator turned President visibly enjoyed talking about all the money he’s sending to Pennsylvania and other states. To the extent that there is a theme to Biden’s campaigning, this is it: he’s got stuff done. So what if it’s a bit of a jumble? It’s progress.
Something Biden had said on Monday stuck with me: “My commitment was, if elected President, I was going to make government work to deliver for the people.” On Tuesday, he repeated this line with a different phrasing, saying he was “making sure our democracy delivers for people.” He’s right: that was a winning argument for him in 2020, running against Donald Trump. He promised to govern as a technocrat, to bring competence and sanity back to the federal government after four years of Trumpian chaos and incompetence.
But that was then. Two years on, a student-loan-forgiveness Web site or even a rebuilt bridge is a hard sell in a country plagued by the worst inflation it’s seen in four decades. Biden’s fall campaign—with a different message each day of the week—hardly seems equal to the moment. “We’re back on track,” Biden said on Thursday. But does anyone, in either party, really believe him?
It’s not just a messaging problem. The essential promise of Biden’s Presidency was that he could make Washington, and America, work again. It is true he has some important achievements to point to: the infrastructure bill and also legislation intended to combat climate change, bring down prescription-drug prices, and boost the domestic semiconductor industry, all goals that had eluded Democrats (and some Republicans) for years. But he is in no position to argue that his broad mission is accomplished, not when many economists expect a recession by next year, and when some recent polls indicate that more than seventy per cent of the public believes the country is on the wrong track. On foreign policy, Biden reassured voters that his years of diplomatic experience would put America back in a global leadership role. Two years later, he has been reduced to holding a photo op about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve nineteen days before an election owing to spiking global oil prices caused by two oil-rich dictators, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who between them seem determined to prove the hollowness of American global leadership. Dystopian times such as these do not lend themselves to cheery pronouncements about safer sidewalks and cleverly designed government Web sites.
Then again, another big problem for Biden is that no one is hearing what he has to say anyway. He is roughly as unpopular in polls today as Trump was before the 2018 midterms, but whereas Trump chose relentless non-stop campaigning—making himself a nearly twenty-four-hour-a-day presence on Twitter and TV, and appearing at no fewer than twenty-six rallies in the month before the 2018 election—Biden is running a modern-day version of a Gerald Ford-style Rose Garden strategy.
Biden has not held a formal campaign rally since before Labor Day, and there are none currently on his schedule. Even when he does travel out of town, it’s generally not been for conventional electioneering. His low-key event in Pennsylvania on Thursday was alongside the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, John Fetterman, but such joint appearances in competitive races this cycle have been rare. Most Democrats have kept their distance from a President whose average disapproval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight, stands at fifty-three per cent.
In fact, Biden’s approval numbers have improved somewhat from their low point over the summer, but the rebound hardly portends a Democratic victory less than three weeks from now. Recent surveys in battleground races have shown momentum shifting to Republicans, and, as Biden headed to Pennsylvania on Thursday, FiveThirtyEight reported that, for the first time since early August, Republicans have overtaken Democrats in its aggregation of polls looking at the generic congressional ballot. Turns out that Democrats, who will lose the House if they are defeated in only a handful of competitive seats, may not be able to defy history and precedent in this election after all.
Biden has often framed his Presidency, and this moment writ large, as part of a monumental new competition between rising autocratic powers and democracies such as the United States. This spring, he talked about the dangers of “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, and in August he warned that the Republican Party—with a resurgent, unrepentant Trump and with hundreds of Trump-inspired election deniers on the ballot this fall—risked descending into “semi-fascism.”
On Tuesday, Biden did not repeat those inflammatory words, but he reiterated his view that this fall’s midterm elections are “the most consequential” in recent history. That is almost certainly true. So why isn’t Biden campaigning as if he means it? ♦