Author: Matt Bai
Reposted from The Washington Post
If there were any lingering doubts about whether Democrats did the right thing by pushing Joe Biden off the ticket in July, any remaining thought that maybe the president — even in a somewhat diminished state — was right to think that he could have beaten Donald Trump, then the exit polls from this week’s election should have put them to rest.
Because however history remembers Biden (and I think it will be kinder), it’s clear that a solid majority of Americans have determined his presidency to be a decisive failure. In Pennsylvania and Georgia, states Biden narrowly won in 2020, just over 40 percent of voters this week approved of his job performance. Nationally, that number was a tick lower, and roughly consistent with just about every poll over the past two years.
More than two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape, but I don’t think that alone tells the story of Biden’s repudiation. The real reason, I think, goes deeper than any one policy or economic indicator.
Biden’s term started out promisingly enough. I thought he misread his mandate and pursued a more expansive agenda than a lot of voters endorsed, but however one judged the substance of his presidency, you couldn’t argue with his legislative success. Biden signed into law about $2.5 trillion in short-term aid and longer-term investments in education, energy and infrastructure. His administration bungled the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, but he rallied Europe capably in its defense of Ukraine.
Biden performed well enough to stave off his party’s losses in the 2022 midterm elections, which emboldened him to run again. But by then, his approval ratings had already been dropping for months. Consumers were reeling from inflation — the result, at least in part, of massive public spending. Americans were increasingly concerned about migrants streaming across the southern border, too.
Underlying all of this, always, was the issue of Biden’s age. He simply didn’t look or sound up to the job. He shuffled rather than strode, slurred his words, kept to scripted material. When Biden gave a perfectly average State of the Union speech earlier this year, managing to depart from the text with a quip here and there, Democrats — and, truth be told, much of the news media — rejoiced as if he’d just won the “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev.
The problem wasn’t merely the president’s age. It was his denial of reality — and his party’s. White House aides portrayed Biden as keeping his young advisers working late into the night, quizzing them for details. They repeated this nonsensical idea that he was the only Democrat alive who could beat Trump, just because he was the only one who had. Democrats denounced anyone who raised the fitness issue as ageist and accused us of abetting Trump.
Ultimately, of course, the world saw Biden at his worst in a televised debate, and party insiders were forced to act, too late. But we’ve been through all that already. The point I want to make is that there’s a common thread in all of this.