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Inflation hit its worst mark in four decades. The southern border situation is the worst it has been in modern history. And the U.S. is now entangled in two wars.
For a man who vowed to bring stability to the White House after four years of Trumpian tumult, President Biden is facing a staggering number of crises, testing his ability to deliver on the quiet competence he promised.
Supporters say Mr. Biden has been unfathomably unlucky, buffeted by global events that would have challenged anyone in office. Opponents blame foreign and domestic policy blunders he could have avoided.
Whatever the cause, the political danger for Mr. Biden is clear: Voters need him to resolve some of the problems, and quickly.
“Biden is suffering from an image that he’s too old for the job, and he has to overcome these crises to prove he is able to do the job,” said Todd Belt, director of the Political Management Program at George Washington University.
SEE ALSO: Disappointed Black voters pull support, imperil Biden reelection
While Mr. Biden, 81, maneuvers through rocky territory with Israel’s war against Hamas, he has been criticized from inside his administration and Democrats at large for his unabashed support of the Jewish state. His administration was instrumental in winning the release of 81 of about 240 hostages in Gaza.
Multiple polls, including in critical states, show Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump in a rematch.
Those polls find Americans increasingly uncertain about Mr. Biden’s leadership capabilities.
A national CNN survey this month found that 72% of Americans said things are going poorly in the U.S. and abroad, and just 25% thought Mr. Biden could handle his job. Less than a third of respondents in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said Mr. Biden has “the competence to carry out the job of the president.”
’Snakebitten’
Mr. Biden has been caught off guard by crises large and small.
He initially dismissed inflation as “transitory,” forcing the White House to scramble as the annual rate approached a 40-year high in 2022.
In his first press conference in March 2021, as the border spiraled out of control, he insisted the migration numbers were seasonal and “happened every year.” Now, after roughly 10 million illegal entries during his term, his team says the problem is global and even worse in other countries.
The White House was slow to recognize the infant formula shortage last year. Mr. Biden said he didn’t think anyone anticipated it. He then embarrassingly conceded that executives had warned the administration in February of coming supply issues because Abbott shuttered its Michigan formula plant.
One week before Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan declared the Middle East “quieter than it has been in two decades.”
The problems and missteps can easily overshadow the president’s successes.
Mr. Biden took office in January 2021 during a once-in-a-century pandemic that was killing 20,000 Americans a week. That figure now hovers at about 1,000.
Mr. Biden has forged an international coalition to help prop up Ukraine, a country of roughly 40 million, against the onslaught of Vladimir Putin and Russia, with its 140 million population and massive war machine.
The official jobless rate remains near historic lows and the economy is shockingly strong, defying predictions of experts who, a year ago, said the chance of a recession by October was 100%.
Mr. Biden’s defenders can’t understand why the public isn’t rewarding him for the economy.
The inflation rate eased to 3.2% in October, and the U.S. has avoided a recession so far while increasing gross domestic product by 1.9% on Mr. Biden’s watch.
“For whatever reason, he doesn’t seem to get the credit for his remarkable economic success,” said Chris Whipple, who has authored books on the Biden administration. “Biden has created millions of jobs — lowest unemployment in generations, lowest Black unemployment — you could go on and on. It is a mystery that he doesn’t get enough credit.”
The fact is, some presidents just seem snakebitten.
Take President George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq figuring Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons — an opinion most experts shared at the time — only to discover that Saddam had quietly ditched the program. Mr. Bush ended his two terms with a spectacular financial collapse that spawned the Great Recession.
Analysts also saw comparisons between Mr. Biden and President Carter, who had to deal with soaring inflation, higher gas prices, crime fears and even a Russian invasion of a neighboring country.
“Jimmy Carter is a great comparison,” said Allan Stam, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. “Both came into office with a worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with the adversaries the U.S. is facing.”
Mr. Whipple saw parallels between Mr. Biden and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came into office during the Great Depression and faced a world teetering toward global war.
“Biden came into office with the most daunting array of challenges since FDR,” he said. “You have to wonder once in a while if life isn’t fair to Democratic presidents.”
Who’s to blame
Whether or not Mr. Biden is “cursed,” his defenders say none of the crises is of his own making.
“When the economy comes back from a near-death experience, inflation is inevitable. The border has been an intractable problem for decades, Biden’s doing an extraordinary job rallying NATO in Ukraine and has been pitch perfect and morally clear in the case of Israel and Hamas,” Mr. Whipple said. “Biden didn’t bring these problems on himself, and he’s done an extraordinary job dealing with them.”
Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s research arm, disagreed. He said the administration’s problems are caused by an effort to cater to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. He said nearly every issue, including inflation, the crisis in the Middle East and runaway federal debt, can be traced back to a liberal ideology.
“All of these crises are interconnected, and it’s all in pursuit of a far-left agenda,” he said. “If you look at the government spending, it’s directly tied to inflation, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan has had repercussions in Ukraine and Israel because we looked weak.”
Mr. Biden also has been trapped by his determination to erase anything Mr. Trump touched.
The Biden team inherited the quietest border in a half-century and a series of get-tough policies from its predecessor. The administration quickly reversed the policies, and the result was record chaos.
Nearly every yardstick for the border has become worse, including terrorism suspects, fentanyl smuggling and illegal crossings. Some 240,000 illegal immigrants were detected at the southern border in September, or three times the rate of December 2020, the last full month under Mr. Trump.
Almost all of those caught in 2020 were pushed back across the border, but most of those encountered under Mr. Biden are released into American communities.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently told a Senate hearing that the world is facing a migration crisis and the U.S. is in the same situation as others. He said Congress, not Mr. Biden, deserves blame for a “broken” U.S. system.
Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah Republican, said that explanation is difficult to square with the numbers, which showed the border breakdown beginning when Mr. Biden became president.
“The key factor that’s changed here is your administration,” Mr. Romney said.
Take the president’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. It ushered in the Taliban’s takeover, the deaths of 13 Americans in a suicide bombing and a chaotic airlift that rescued the wrong people, spiriting tens of thousands off the streets of Kabul while leaving behind tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to help the U.S. military over 20 years.
Mr. Stam said Mr. Putin saw weakness that emboldened Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the emerging bloc of U.S. adversaries.
“One of the things the war in Ukraine has done is bring together — out of necessity — Iran, Russia, North Korea and China in terms of economics and sharing security,” he said. “Once the avalanche begins, it’s really hard to stop it, and they tend to get bigger the further down the hill they go.”
Mr. Biden’s critics say his actions weren’t strong enough to dissuade Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine and his economic sanctions on Moscow have done little to slow Russia’s war machine. Instead, Mr. Putin has turned to North Korea for weapons and a trading partner.
Critics also say Mr. Biden was too quick to publicly rule out U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine, signaling little resistance to Mr. Putin’s incursion.
Others say Mr. Putin was determined to seize Ukraine before Mr. Biden took office. They give Mr. Biden high marks for helping wean European economies off Russian oil and holding together the NATO alliance to discourage Russian aggression elsewhere in Europe. The money and weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine have helped fend off the invaders longer than most experts predicted.
“He’s handled Ukraine really well. He rallied our allies in Ukraine and worked to get grain flowing again into Ukraine,” Mr. Belt said. “Putin didn’t count on that. Putin thought the war would be over last winter, and it wasn’t.”
Gridlock in Congress hasn’t helped Mr. Biden.
“There was a period years ago where Congress was able to carry the load for the president on some of these issues, but because Congress can’t get out of its own way, the burden is failing nearly entirely on the executive branch,” Mr. Stam said. “That has made these situations worse.”
The big question for Mr. Biden now is whether voters will take out their frustrations on him in November 2024.
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• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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