Without an ongoing crisis, President Biden is nothing. With an ongoing crisis, he is Ramesses the Great.
Without an ongoing crisis, President Biden is nothing. With an ongoing crisis, he is Ramesses the Great.
I s Joe Biden the president of the United States? Those who have noticed the frequency with which the man’s statements are corrected, clarified, or flat-out repudiated might be forgiven for wondering. It remains unclear whether this president will elect to run for a second term, but, if he does, his political advertising team would do well to adopt as his slogan: “Joe Biden 2024: He Didn’t Really Mean That.”
The latest round of febrile rectifications was prompted by an emphatic declaration that President Biden offered up on last Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes. “We still have a problem with Covid,” Biden told CBS’s Scott Pelley. “We’re still doing a lot of work on it . . . but the pandemic is over.” To which an astonishing number of people in Biden’s orbit responded: “No, it’s damn well not!” Within hours, an unnamed White House official had told CNN that, “The President’s comments do not mark a change in policy.” On MNSBC yesterday, Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, felt the need to explain at length “what the President is reflecting.” Today, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, urged us all “to step back for a second” and alter our perceptions of “what we saw during that interview.” Reflecting on the fracas, Politico offered up a pithy summary of the incident — and, indeed, of the broader tendency on display: “Biden declared the pandemic ‘over,’” the outlet recorded, before adding: “His Covid team says it’s more complicated.”
Given the obvious political incentives here — it is, without a doubt, in the Democratic Party’s electoral interests for the pandemic to be deemed “over” — one might well ask why Biden’s admission provoked such a swift and forceful reaction. Surely, it is now time for Biden to declare “Mission Accomplished”? Ah, but there is politics and then there is power, and, in this case, the desire for power is proving too strong to resist.
Examined from a distance, Joe Biden’s presidency looks sterile. His approval rating oscillates between 38 and 43 percent; his party has 50 seats in the Senate, and a razor-thin House majority; and, if the polls are to be believed, his days at the head of a unified Democratic government are destined to be over before next year’s Super Bowl. Two years in, Biden is already a lame duck. Or, at least, he would be, absent the extraordinary emergency powers to which he has routinely sought to lay claim. Without an ongoing crisis, President Biden is nothing. With an ongoing crisis, he is Ramesses the Great.
Consider this missive from the editorial board of the Washington Post:
Mr. Biden has not ended the official pandemic emergency. When the official emergency ends, some 15 million will lose Medicaid coverage; the reason for a student loan repayment pause will end; the rationale for Trump-era border restrictions, still held in place by a court, will disappear. All this policy transition must not be done carelessly or hastily.
The incentives here are obvious. Emergencies tend to turbocharge government power; the Democrats are hoping to turbocharge government power; ergo, the Democrats will try to hold onto this particular emergency for as long as they possibly can. Lest this appear to be a theory — or, worse, mere rhetoric — consider that, just one month ago, President Biden decided to transfer up to a trillion dollars of student-debt liability over to taxpayers, on the grounds that the 2003 HEROES Act accords such a power to the executive branch each and every time there is anything that can be plausibly deemed a crisis. With a crisis in place, the justification for the move was risible. Without a crisis in place, the justification would have been non-existent. Evidently, President Biden’s team knows this — and, unlike Biden himself, it is aware that he cannot have it both ways. Why, you ask, is the White House gainsaying the man in charge? Follow the money.
Which is all to say that we are not, in fact, witnessing a series of straight-talkin’ gaffes followed by the inevitable nuance-laden ameliorations, but a struggle between conflicting prerogatives. On the one hand, the Democratic Party does not want to lose power during the 2022 midterms, and, at some level, it grasps that Covid-19 has become a terrible liability at the polls. On the other hand, the continuation of Covid-19 allows that same Democratic Party to contrive all manner of pretexts for achieving unilaterally what it cannot do with the consent of the governed. Decisions, decisions, decisions.