Dem chances rise and fall with Joe
These days it’s not easy being a Democrat, not with the mid-term elections looming.
Empowered to govern by majorities in the House and Senate and by virtue of the party’s control of the White House, Democrats have nonetheless been unable to fully exercise their authority.
Two dissenting Democratic senators – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have blocked efforts to pass a multi-trillion- dollar legislative package which includes free community college and universal pre-kindergarten, and other items high on the Democrats’ need-to-do-list.
Besides Manchin and Sinema barring the way to important reforms, there’s inflation, last year’s muddled exit from Afghanistan, and the continuing struggle with COVID.
All have clouded Democratic prospects for 2022. But of course those prospects begin and end with one man, the president of the United States.
So how goes Joe Biden?
For one thing, the president, up to this point, at least, appears to be deftly handling the threats coming from Russia and its cagey autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, to take down now-sovereign Ukraine (it was once part of the former Soviet Union).
But who knows how this crisis close at the Russian border will turn out? Will the NATO allies stick together? Will the Russians “blink” first? Will there be a European war, the first in eight decades?
Presidents, most of them anyway, make hard decisions. Sometimes those decisions exact a toll. Biden’s popularity, as measured by the polls, has plummeted since last summer, both because he has made some tough choices and because he has bungled some things.
Now, the president’s popularity may recover with a positive (for the United States) resolution of the Ukraine crisis. Likewise, if the administration and the Federal Reserve find ways to dampen the inflationary fires without killing off the Biden economic recovery, the fastest since the 1980s. Likewise, if COVID is finally brought to heel.
But what if these things happen and there’s not a corresponding rise in Biden’s poll numbers, especially among independents? First, that would be a surprise. Second, it could happened, given voters’ mostly scour attitude toward all public officials. Third, it could happen, given Biden’s age and the perception of whether or not he’s up to the job.
You have to be a hyper-partisan to think Biden is senile. In fact, I think he’s pretty sharp. He began his public career decades ago in a political environment that valued comity (up to a point) and undervalued race and gender as pivot points.
The fact that he emerged as the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 against a field of candidates younger and, one might say, hipper than himself proved his mental (and physical) stamina. And nothing has happened since he moved into the White House to suggest Biden’s mental acuity has declined even a little.
He’s adapted. He’s adaptable. He easily passes the F. Scott Fitzgerald intelligence test: “The ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
He’s got facts and figures at his fingertips. He knows the world, and he especially knows Putin is not a friend. He knows the difference between his personal interest and the national interest. He’s not in thrall to his own ego.
But here’s the deal, folks: Biden sounds old. He can stumble through a speech with the best of them. In addition, his walk is not the most vigorous. Anecdotally, I’ve come to realize this gives pause to folks who are in the prime of life, even those who are rooting for him.
It’s my experience that folks 20 to 50 years old tend to dismiss people Biden’s age. They are seen irrelevant and out of touch. They are not in the thick of things.
I felt the same way when I was their age. I recall a retired editor who stopped regularly in the newsroom to chat up the reporters. I was polite – I hope I was polite – but what he told me went in one ear and out the other. I was in my 20s. The retired editor was well into his 70s. Lordy, his newspaper career started during World War I, 52 years before I met him.
Biden entered the Senate in 1972, exactly 50 years ago.
What does this mean in terms of the mid-term elections? Maybe not much. It can be argued that months of Democratic squabbling on Capitol Hill has done more to harm the party’s chances of holding the House and Senate this November than anything Biden has, or hasn’t, done.
In other words, blame the Dems’ possible drubbing in November on the other Joe – Joe Manchin.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.