Joe Biden HAS been a pretty Good President…He has NOT been good at selling THAT…..
The Economy has NOT helped his case either…..
The Washington Post does a after action report half way thru Joe Biden’s first term in office….
The story of Biden’s first term so far is a roller coaster — complicated and contradictory, with remarkable achievements and enormous disappointment. His administration oversaw the most successful vaccine rollout in history, ushering in a post-pandemic sense of normalcy — yet the country is gearing up for new worrisome variants as it heads into winter. And Biden helped mitigate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — while also strengthening the transatlantic alliance and growing NATO — but he did so against a backdrop in which rising prices, fueled in part by his policies, formed the fabric of Americans’ daily lives.
For the man who had promised to heal the soul of the nation, the presidency proved a test of his own.
Some people closest to the president describe an administration that achieved significant victories while repeatedly running up against the limits of the federal bureaucracy, a tissue-thin majority in Congress and a deeply divided nation. Aides also often failed to anticipate and plan for worst-case scenarios and regularly set expectations above what they could achieve. Biden and his team were elected on the promise of a new era of competent governance, only to find that the most rigorous science and best expert advice could not protect the country from new waves of disease and economic hardship.
Biden — a tactile, retail politician — found himself stuck in a bubble, both of covid beyond his control and insularity of his own making. The president remains surrounded by a coterie of longtime allies, most of whom have worked for him for decades. Even those with senior titles in the White House say there remains a clear stratification between Biden’s trusted inner circle and the rest of the team….
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This portrait of Biden’s presidency as it approaches the two-year mark is the result of interviews with 80 senior White House officials, Cabinet secretaries, outside allies and Democratic lawmakers and strategists, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share private details. Many of the scenes and details have not been previously reported.
Ultimately Biden achieved much of what he promised as a candidate. He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, amid a record pace of judicial appointees that placed more Black women on appellate courts than all prior presidents combined. With the narrowest control of Congress in decades, he passed laws on covid relief, infrastructure, climate change, manufacturing, gun regulation and prescription drug prices that in most cases had spent years on Democratic wish lists.
A precision strike he ordered killed the long-standing head of al-Qaeda, and he continues to hold together a jittery coalition of nations to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, bolstering his promise to restore American leadership abroad.
But as inflation rose and coronavirus variants battered the country, he also lost the support of the public, with his approval rating plummeting to below 40 percent this summer — landing him among the presidents with the all-time lowest ratings at the same point during their first terms — before rebounding somewhat in September to match the approval ratings of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton at the same point in their presidencies.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll last month found 56 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents wanted the party to nominate someone other than Biden as its candidate in 2024. At the same time, 75 percent of Democratic leaners said they approved of Biden, and 94 percent of Democratic voters said they would support Biden in a 2024 matchup against Trump….
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Many aides privately admit they wish all the recent successes came sooner and easier — without the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, without the Democratic infighting, and without the cascade of coronavirus variants. Biden himself eventually succumbed to the virus, testing positive in July, though he recovered without incident.
“Part of what’s in the DNA of the team is that he’s had to play through some really rough moments, for a long period of time,” Donilon said. “Obviously we went through a long period of time during the campaign when it didn’t look so good. It was true during the campaign and it’s true during the presidency.”…
image…Biden convenes a virtual meeting with governors to discuss efforts to protect access to reproductive health care on July 1, 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)