At home and abroad, Joe Biden is finding he is nowhere near as persuasive as he thought he was.
Axios informs us that “President Biden failed to persuade Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to agree to spending $3.5 trillion on the Democrats’ budget reconciliation package during their Oval Office meeting on Wednesday,” declaring in a headline, “Biden bombs with Manchin.”
Every politician walks into office with an enormous, and probably unrealistic, sense of his own ability to persuade others. But with each passing week, the gap between the president that Joe Biden thinks he is, and the president that he actually is, grows a little bit wider.
The Financial Times reported that last week Chinese president Xi Jinping turned down an offer from Biden for a face-to-face meeting. Biden insisted the report was not true. One foreign analyst concluded that the Chinese government gave a warmer reception to the Taliban than they did to U.S. presidential envoy John Kerry in early September.
Biden’s new security deal with the U.K. and Australia has left the French livid. “France accused U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday of stabbing it in the back and acting like his predecessor Donald Trump after Paris was pushed aside from a historic defense export contract to supply Australia with submarines.”
The surge of migrants at the border has not been part of a predictable seasonal pattern. The inflation that was supposed to be short-lived continues to drag on; if you doubt the impact, ask your neighbors about their grocery bills. The pandemic that Biden pledged to shut down has killed more than 25,000 Americans so far this month, even with 76 percent of American adults having received at least one shot of the vaccine. The administration that promised to “follow the science” on vaccines is grappling with what to do when FDA scientists don’t have a consensus on the value of booster shots. Scientists are noticing that the administration’s pledge to “follow the science” has been dependent upon the political convenience of what the science is indicating.
Biden, Antony Blinken, and the rest of the president’s team spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back and declaring that “America is back!” after taking office. But as autumn arrives, they look naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads. A flailing president is a failing president.