British politics may seem particularly degenerate this week, yet Boris Johnson’s troubles are as nothing to the pile of disasters engulfing America’s Commander-in-Chief. Joe Biden’s leadership is a catastrophe – and it’s only getting worse.
Let us count the crises. The number of Covid hospitalisations in America has just hit an all time high. Inflation is worse than it has been in almost four decades. Biden’s preposterously expensive ‘Build Back Better’ plan is stuck in Congress. And his approval rating has, according to one poll, sunk to 33 per cent, five points lower than Donald Trump in the same poll at the same stage of his presidency.
Rather than tackle the manifold problems he faces, Biden has taken to banging his head against legislative walls. On Thursday, his vaccine mandate – intended to force the Covid vaccine on the employees of large companies – was rejected by the Supreme Court. Biden responded by expressing bolshy disappointment at the Court for blocking “common-sense life-saving requirements”.
How low can Joe go? His genial elder statesman persona is breaking under the strain. It’s hard to recall a worse speech by a US president than the one he delivered on Tuesday in Georgia. “Seems like yesterday just yesterday the first time I got arrested,” he began, a nod to his notoriously dubious account of being arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela. He angrily proposed removing the Senate filibuster, an important part of the US legislative process, to embolden his plans to nationalise the election process and override state-by-state changes to favour the Democrats.
Biden’s rage was theatrical and hammy: the voice of a desperate leader who fears being judged at the ballot. The mid-terms are coming up in November, and the Democrats are already anticipating heavy losses.
The only source of optimism for Team Biden is the hope that things can’t get worse. Americans love a comeback narrative, and the largely anti-Republican corporate media will desperately try to build one in the run up to November. Expectations here are now so low that anything less than a historic trouncing could be interpreted as a surprising boon for the White House.
In the meantime, his party is turning against him. The number of Democrat voters who disapprove of his job performance has doubled since his inauguration. Democratic operatives in Washington whisper darkly about a ‘plan B’ to force Biden out ahead of 2024. The original ‘plan B’ was the vice president, Kamala Harris, but her political ineptitude is so mind-blowing that it makes Biden seem competent. This week, she told reporters that the administration would send out 500 million free Covid tests next week, only to be corrected by the White House, saying they would be dispatched next month.
So now political operators are talking up emergency replacements. This week Douglas E. Schoen, formerly a Democratic party adviser, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to moot the possibility of Hillary Clinton running again for the White House. A wild idea, no doubt, given her enduring unpopularity. But the fact that it’s been taken seriously shows the desperation in Democratic circles.
