If recent stories of his growing unease are any indication, President Biden isn’t getting much sleep these days.
NBC published a piece on Sunday titled “Behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about re-election effort,” and Biden is right to be both angry and anxious — angry at himself for not picking a competent VP to whom he could hand his agenda while stepping aside after four years, and anxious because Trump is on the outside this time and not burdened with the Covid fallout (shutdowns, economic stoppages, and civil unrest) in which the real-estate mogul was drowning during the previous go-around. If, as many wrote in 2020, that presidential election was a referendum on Trump, 2024 looks to be a referendum on what Biden has done since then. A 38 percent approval rating to pair with a grocery-price increase of 23 percent since 2020 says most of what needs telling.
Finding himself hemmed in by aides turned nurses and an embarrassingly asthenic body and mind, Biden shuffles forward, having installed no off-ramps (despite an affection for prodigious infrastructure pork spending).
NBC News reports:
Biden has long believed that he isn’t getting sufficient credit for an economy that has created 15 million new jobs. Looking to reach distracted voters who may be tuning in, he told his speechwriters before the State of the Union address to tone down some of the lofty rhetoric and plainly lay out what he’s done, a person familiar with speech preparations said.
During internal discussions, he’ll press aides about which parts of his record to highlight in different states, said a second person who is familiar with the matter.
Surrounded by protective aides who want to minimize the chances of a flub, the 81-year-old president has chafed at restraints that he sees as counter to his natural instincts as a retail politician, a third person familiar with internal discussions said.
He has felt cocooned at times and has been eager to get out more, meet voters face-to-face and take the fight directly to Trump, said the third person and a fourth also familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy and the president’s private views.
When one is vetust, getting to and from a doctor’s office is an achievement. Joe Biden, in his pride, opted to try his hand at representing the free world at such an age. Fifteen million jobs are not so many when counted from the trough that was the Covid disruption — counting from 2019, a more accurate baseline, the U.S. has added about 4 million jobs, while about 6 million were added during the Trump years. Muttering untruths to himself like a glamoured Théoden or the grimacing Hector Salamanca doesn’t change how Americans rightly perceive the underwhelming recovery from the state’s intrusion in their lives.
Now that a (pompadoured) barbarian is at his gate, Biden prepares to don his armor and finds it oversized and cumbersome. Beset by mortality and the ministrations of caretakers, he rages without the strength to chip a teacup or the time to elevate a subordinate without damaging his legacy — which has already been etched in stone as “Not Trump.”