AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
Today marks one year exactly since Joe Biden took office as the 46th President of the United States. It’s been a rough 365 days, to say the least. In a press conference Wednesday – his first in 10 months and just the second of his presidency – Biden attempted what the media has begun referring to as a “reset,” a desperate new effort to persuade Americans to support his leadership and policies even as a record number of them now disapprove of his presidency.
But while Biden did not appear to have much success Wednesday on resetting the direction of his administration, here are five reason why Biden’s presidency has gone so poorly and was likely doomed from the very beginning.
Biden can’t admit when he is wrong and blames everyone else when things go south.
Joe Biden often repeats the line that “the buck stops with me.” However, his rhetoric and actions are more reflective of a president who thinks every problem is anyone else’s fault but his own.
On COVID-19, perhaps the clearest example of a crisis that has gotten worse, not better under Biden’s leadership, the president has blamed unvaccinated Americans, Donald Trump, and Republicans in general for soaring case and death numbers. Never mind the fact that his administration failed to anticipate future variants of the virus, abandoned the Trump administration’s strategy of aggressively investing in therapeutics in addition to vaccines, and presided over testing shortages two years into the pandemic. There’s also the inconvenient truth that it was Biden himself who was the first to sow vaccine hesitancy and politicize the pandemic ahead of the 2020 election.
Following Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, the pattern of blaming others began again. Despite the fact that multiple top military officials are on record saying they opposed Biden’s withdrawal strategy, the president claimed otherwise, saying that it was them who advised him to take the disastrous step of abandoning Bagram Air Base. Biden also blamed President Trump, as well as the Afghan army and political leaders, accusing the latter of an “unwillingness to fight” – after they had done most of the fighting and dying in the country over the past several years with U.S. support. Biden’s finger-pointing was so egregious that even his reliable ally Jake Tapper over at CNN openly criticized the president after a major speech on the failure, saying, “He said the buck stopped with him in a speech full of finger pointing.”
Biden has also absurdly blamed Trump for both the border crisis and for persistent shortages as a result of a supply chain crunch directly exacerbated by Biden’s irresponsible spending policies.
In short, Biden appears to believe that any problem facing the country is the fault of someone else.
Of course, the blame game can only begin once Biden acknowledges that there is even a problem, which is no sure bet for the beleaguered president. At his press conference Wednesday, he more often than not simply insisted that “everything is fine,” and that families who are dealing with school closures or empty shelves at the grocery store are part of a “small minority.” Therefore, the implication seemed to be, they need not worry that their lives were being disrupted, and it is of no concern to the Biden administration. The “reset,” then, quickly became an insistence that people must be imagining that their lives have gotten worse since Biden took office, when in fact, according to Biden, the country is doing better.
Americans want leaders who take responsibility for the crises they are facing. A long list of grievances and blame-shifting to others who may have played some role in each subsequent disaster begins to ring hollow quickly.
Biden made a corrupt bargain with the Radical Left and surrendered his presidency to them before it even started.
From the beginning of Biden’s political career, he has always appeared driven far more by a personal ambition for power than any commitment to a specific set of ideological principles.
Over his nearly four decades in politics, Biden has shifted his position on nearly every issue imaginable – racial integration in schools (Biden originally opposed it), crime and mass incarceration, the filibuster, U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and, more recently, vaccine mandates, just to name a few examples. Wherever the political winds have shifted, so too has Joe Biden, saying and doing whatever was necessary to move up to that next rung on the ladder of power.
In 2020, that meant selling out to the radical left and progressives who appeared poised to sink his campaign. Soon after Bernie Sanders backed out of the race, Biden announced a “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” that later released a list of recommendations straight out of the Sanders playbook. Despite often billing himself as a “pragmatic moderate,” Biden then promised to be the “most progressive” president in American history.
Since entering office, it has been abundantly clear that Biden still feels beholden to the radical left and fears what it might mean to alienate their support. His $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan was little more than a laundry list of progressive priorities.
These facts are inextricably linked to Joe Biden’s tanking poll numbers and his inability to forge unity among even elected Democrats. Americans hate extremism, and by submitting to the radical left to secure his party’s nomination in 2020, Biden surrendered his presidency to a political ideology that commands, at best, 25% support among the public at large.
Biden’s campaign was built on lies.
The narrative that Joe Biden would govern as a moderate is perhaps the biggest lie underpinning his 2020 campaign. But it’s not the only one.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a convenient if ultimately self-defeating fantasy upon which the Biden team based their campaign. COVID was Donald Trump’s fault, they asserted, and only a Biden presidency could end the pandemic. “I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country,” was the line we heard over and over again from a candidate who more often than not appeared on a video feed from inside his basement in Delaware. It sounded good, to be sure – but what that promise didn’t come with was any realistic plan for actually getting the virus under control.
Now, as case numbers and deaths continue to rise, Biden seems bewildered as to why the country blames him for the crisis. It’s possible, as Biden says, that no one could’ve predicted how the pandemic would change and develop (although a growing body of evidence suggests otherwise). But the fact remains that Biden based his campaign largely on a lie—the lie that any politician in a nation as large as ours could singlehandedly end a global pandemic.
Beyond the lies that came directly from Biden’s lips, there was also the lie the Biden campaign, elected Democrats, and the mainstream media told the country that Biden was in any state to seek and hold the most powerful elected office in the world. They insisted that his rare public appearances were due to concerns about the virus and wanting to “set a good example” of social distancing during the pandemic. The media explained away his forgetfulness and incoherent ramblings as a “stutter,” a “choppy speaking style,” or, perhaps most ridiculously of all, products of Republican “misinformation.”
Over his first year in office, it has become increasingly clear with each fumbled line, vacant stare, and lost train of thought that this is not the case. Biden is in a clear state of cognitive decline – something that polling shows at least half the country recognizes. One reporter even pressed Biden on this statistic Wednesday evening, asking the president why, in his opinion, so many Americans now believe he is not mentally fit enough to do the job. “I have no idea,” Biden replied. That seems to be a running theme for the President.
Biden’s “Mr. Nice Guy” persona has been revealed as the sham it always was.
Throughout the 2020 campaign and in the early days of his presidency, the media attempted to construct an image of “nice guy” Joe Biden that has proven to have no basis in reality. They insisted that a Biden administration would mean a “return to normalcy,” based on the notion that Biden is just an all-around decent man with a good heart and good intentions.
Instead, the Joe Biden Americans have seen on their TV screens is mean-spirited and callous, often angry at anyone who dares disagree with him and bitter that Americans seem unable to grasp the depth of his greatness. His infamous speech in Georgia last week quickly devolved into Biden yelling into the microphone about “voter suppression” – before comparing all Republicans, as well as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, to Jefferson Davis, Bull Connor, and George Wallace. When a reporter yesterday asked Biden about that comparison, he grew angry at the reporter, insisting that it was not he, but the reporter, who must be mistaken about an explicit comparison made by the President.
It wasn’t the first time Biden lost his temper, either. When ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked the president last summer about the horrifying image of two Afghans falling to their deaths from the wheels of a departing American C-17 transport plane, Biden snapped back that it was “four, five days ago,” as if that settled the matter. The president also reportedly has a history of disrespecting Gold Star families, was seen checking his watch multiple times during a dignified transfer of slain Americans at Dover Air Force Base, and aides have revealed that behind closed doors Biden is often short-tempered. Over the past year, we also saw Biden use the power of the federal government to vindictively target his political enemies, like using the FBI to go after parents who speak out against Critical Race Theory at school board hearings.
Here, then, we see another reason for Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. The Mr. Nice Guy act clearly isn’t working anymore, and people are far less willing to forgive the many failures of someone who is in fact a mean and angry person.
Biden is an incompetent leader, and has always been regarded as such by those around him.
A Washington Post opinion piece put it aptly late last week in saying that, one year in, Biden is “adrift,” “too small for the office,” and being “whipsawed” by the many pressures of being the leader of the free world. Biden reportedly struggles to follow in-depth policy discussions, taking days or weeks to make up his mind while frequently second-guessing himself and others. Even his own staff don’t seem to have any confidence in him: they conspicuously try to stop him from taking questions.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed Biden’s political career. Since his entry into politics, the knock on Biden was always that he was an unserious blowhard with a propensity for stumbling into disaster. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to (expletive) things up,” former President Obama allegedly warned prior to Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2020. It appears Obama’s reservations about backing Biden were well-founded, and that Biden’s three failed presidential bids were no coincidence.
As a senator and Vice President, much of this characteristic incompetence was hidden by the fact that, compared to the presidency, there were relatively few ramifications for his foolishness and ego. His grossly overdeveloped sense of his own judgement and capability were, more or less, harmless. But no longer.
“Can you think of any other president who has done so much in a year?” That was the question Biden asked reporters several times Wednesday. In truth, he might have a point – rarely in history has a president managed to so completely squander what he inherited from his predecessor while also setting the stage for a whole new slate of disasters that are entirely of his own making. For the sake of the American people and the future of the country, let’s hope the president doesn’t go for a repeat act in 2022.