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Protesters hang a banner reading “Biden Protect Abortion” from a crane at a construction site at North Capitol Street and Florida Avenue NE, June 28, 2022, in Washington.
President Biden’s approval rating just keeps sinking and sinking—down to a low of just 39 percent in the FiveThirtyEight poll average, or about three points below where Donald Trump was at a similar point in his term. Unlike Trump, Biden’s poor numbers are mainly thanks to weak support among his own base. Where Trump commanded virtual lockstep loyalty among Republicans, Biden is staggeringly unpopular among wide swaths of Democrats—particularly young folks. Americans aged 18–29 have gone from +37 approval at the beginning of his term to 11 points net disapproval today.
Part of this has to do with how Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have obstructed Biden’s agenda, making him look weak and helpless. But a lot of it is entirely his own fault. At a time when Democrats are desperate for leadership—especially some kind of strategy to deal with a lawless and extreme Supreme Court—he is missing in action.
If Biden can’t shore up support among his core constituencies, he will undoubtedly attract primary challengers. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are already eyeing the possibility, and rightly so, because running a candidate with sub-40 percent approval is asking to get whipped in 2024.
The president’s biggest leadership failure to date, and perhaps a signature that stands in for his entire term, is surely the lack of response to Roe v. Wade being overturned. Not only did the decision leak (in almost identical form) months beforehand—an extremely unusual event—but any fool could have seen it coming the moment Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020. Republicans have been gunning for Roe almost since the day it passed, and they were always going to seize the opportunity once they could count to five on the Court. Reproductive rights groups have also kept close tabs on state-level restrictions and trigger laws that would take force the moment Roe was killed, and the untold chaos they would create for women, abortion clinics, doctors, hospitals, and so on.
The political necessity was also obvious. About 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases, including 80 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of people 18–29 years old. Protecting reproductive rights is a central tenet of the Democratic coalition, and it was therefore vital for the party to have some plan to do that after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
But the Biden administration was, impossibly, caught flat-footed, about which Democratic Party insiders dished brutal details to CNN recently. Biden’s team had no immediate plan—even on the day of the ruling, White House counsel Dana Remus assured staff that it wouldn’t be released. Now, two weeks after the Dobbs decision, top aides are still squabbling over what the administration should do. A conference of Democratic governors was arranged last Friday, so late that none could attend in person and some declined to do it at all. Initially, the administration dismissed ending the filibuster to pass a codification of Roe, though Biden did later reverse course.
The president’s biggest leadership failure to date is surely the lack of response to Roe v. Wade being overturned.
Instead, it turns out that the very day the Dobbs decision dropped, the White House was going to cut a spectacularly terrible deal with Mitch McConnell to nominate an anti-abortion Republican to a lifetime seat in the federal judiciary in return for McConnell not blocking the appointment of two U.S. attorneys. (This bargain appears to be on ice for the moment.)
On the question of what to do about the Supreme Court, which is poised to strike down democracy entirely, Biden offers nothing. On the contrary, he dismissed the idea of expansion, and according to Reuters, is concerned that “more radical moves would … undermine public trust in institutions like the Supreme Court.” He might as well just hand the Court a list of other cherished freedoms they can repeal without consequence.
It’s why one Democratic member of Congress told CNN the White House is “rudderless, aimless and hopeless.” The views of more than two dozen party elites go “deeper than questions of ideology and posture. Instead, they say, it gets to questions of basic management.”
An instructive book in this area is The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, by Jeff Connaughton, who was a Biden aide and D.C. lobbyist for many years. The book is blistering about Biden’s work ethic and his basic political orientation. He described learning from Biden’s top aides when he first started: “They knew Biden would ignore every task he didn’t want to do and every person he didn’t want to deal with.”
After years of loyal service, Connaughton asked Biden for help getting a job in the Clinton administration, only for Biden to blow him off. Another Biden aide explained this by way of a comparison to the late Ted Kennedy. Unlike the Massachusetts senator, “Biden is only about himself becoming president, he doesn’t care about force projection, so he never helps his former staff get jobs,” the aide said. Kennedy “cultivated and promoted staff not just because he was a decent boss, but because he had an ideological agenda and the staff served it across Washington,” Connaughton concluded. “In contrast, Biden is a pragmatist. His ambitions, I was coming to understand, were mainly about himself.”
With this perspective, a lot about how Biden behaves swims into focus. When he cares a lot about something, like getting out of Afghanistan, he can be determined and even endure tremendous pressure. But when he doesn’t—like on student debt forgiveness, facing up to what the Supreme Court has become, or evidently protecting the right to choose—he dithers and procrastinates even when it causes him great political harm. And because the president is the only one who can decide on priorities or pick between competing options, the White House ends up riven with indecision and squabbling.
When things go well, like in the beginning of his term with the passage of a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Biden can look good. But most of the decisions that rise to the president are hard, and Biden’s history has been to take his time on the hard stuff to the point of paralysis. Americans are starved for leadership, and don’t want to see a president carried away by events and unable to act.
Biden did get what he has long wanted—to be president. But if he wants to stay there for a second term, he is going to have to change many of his old habits.
