A look back at President Biden's first year.
 | By Ezekiel Kweku Politics Editor, Opinion |
President Biden's candidacy had a very simple premise: It was time to get things back to normal. When he jumped into the race, what needed to go back to "normal" was American politics, which had been turned, in the eyes of many voters, into a 24/7 spectacle by the presidency of Donald Trump. By the time the general election campaign had begun, "normal" had grown to include the end of the pandemic, which Biden pledged to "shut down." |
One year after he took office, argues Matthew Yglesias in a guest essay, the president has made surprising strides toward returning the country's politics back to normal, passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill and making progress toward passing another bill to expand science funding and strengthen the supply chain. Democrats are frustrated with Biden's inability to pass the sweeping reforms he proposed during the campaign, but for Yglesias, these are the normal kind of frustrations associated with having a narrow legislative majority. |
The problem is that while American politics may have returned to normal, the country hasn't. Yglesias chalks this up to the continuing dislocations of the pandemic — which Biden has failed to "shut down" — and inflation caused by efforts to buoy the economy in their wake. |
This sense that things have not returned to normal is shared by independent voters in the focus group we convened recently. In fact, for these voters — who voted for both Obama and Trump — things feel like they are spiraling out of control at a more fundamental level. "Things are kind of chaotic. I feel like there's no rules, really," said one voter. For them, rising inflation combined with rising crime, has created a deep sense of disorder and insecurity. |
In her guest essay reflecting on her experience of reading her poem at the inauguration, Amanda Gorman captures this mood well, writing that "while the inauguration might have seemed like a ray of light, this past year for many has felt like a return to the same old gloom." |
Restoring a "feeling of normalcy around American politics and daily life — as he promised to do during the campaign — would itself be a transformative change," writes Yglesias, and argues that the way to do this is to focus on addressing the short-term problems of inflation and Covid, and less on sweeping legislative change. Nobody in our focus group, though, has confidence in Biden's ability to do this, and, strikingly, not one of them said they wanted to see Biden run for re-election in 2024. There's still plenty of time until 2024, but it seems Biden has a lot of work to do.
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