Imagine President Joe Biden opening up the doors on his advent calendar on these final days before Christmas.
On the 21st, the doors reveal: a graph depicting the decline in Biden’s approval ratings from 55 percent in January to 44 percent today,
On the 22nd: a photograph of a helicopter hovering over the US embassy in Kabul as Afghanistan falls to the Taliban in August.
On the 23rd: another graph, this time of the inflation rate, rising from 1.4 percent on Election Day to 6.8 percent in November.
And finally, on December 24th: Sen. Joe Manchin, the man who finally performed a mercy killing on the doomed Build Back Better bill, dressed as Santa, waving at him in one of those weird plastic-rubber 3D picture cards that were popular 50 years ago.
I’m not saying Joe Biden is his own worst enemy. It’s more like he’s his own worst best friend, a man who gives himself absolutely terrible advice and is deeply grateful to himself both for offering and listening to such sage counsel.
Never has a politician snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in quite the manner Biden has.
He came into office having won with a highly respectable margin — 7 million votes nationwide and an 80 electoral-vote advantage.
Those totals were consonant with the relatively modest set of promises he made to the American people — to restore a sense of normalcy to the nation’s public life, to get a handle on COVID and to lower the national temperature.
So were the congressional results. He may have won, but House Democrats lost 13 seats and the Senate ended up with a 50-50 tie. The national mood was unmistakable: This was not a time for radicalism or a completely dramatic break from the recent past.
Indeed, Biden found himself in a perfect position to underpromise and overdeliver, which should be the dream of all politicians.
Instead, he overpromised and, even when he had a chance to deliver, he actively tried to slash the tires on his own delivery truck. That’s what happened when the politically feasible parts of his gigantic domestic-spending bill — the so-called “hard infrastructure” elements — were split apart from the left-liberal wish-list items and sailed through the Senate with 69 votes.
This was the most significant display of bipartisanship (outside an emergency situation, like the financial meltdown or COVID) in a generation. And Biden himself nearly torpedoed it.
He announced he supported an effort to hold the Senate bill hostage until Congress agreed to the left-liberal wish-list bill — now named “Build Back Better.” So for three months Democrats argued amongst themselves about this until finally it occurred to enough of them that they were being insane to surrender a victory on a major piece of legislation.
The infrastructure bill finally passed and was signed by the president. To very little political effect. And by that point it didn’t seem like much of a win at all. Because that’s how Biden seemed to view it.
Biden wants things that won’t happen, which means he has lost sight of the fact that politics is the art of the possible. And he commits himself to actions that have instant deleterious consequences — like the catastrophic Afghanistan bugout — because he doesn’t think the possible scenarios all the way through.
It seems like he took up residency in the White House and immediately determined to save up lumps of coal throughout the year . . . to put in his own Christmas stocking.
Merry Christmas, Big Guy. Make some New Year’s resolutions. You know, to help you build back better before it’s too late.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
