Joe Biden Never Bounced Back

The initial Democratic panic over this weekend’s New York Times poll has subsided a bit, and you’re seeing some of the usual suspects like Donna Brazile and Jim Messina assure Democrats that things looked grim for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, and Obama ended up winning comfortably. The implication is that Biden has just hit a rough patch, and the almost 81-year-old Biden will make a comeback comparable to Obama’s in the 2012 cycle.

Every now and then, I take a look at this assessment from Susan Glasser of The New Yorker from late September 2021. A couple other columnists and I had been hitting Biden pretty hard during that period. The withdrawal from Afghanistan had been a scandal and national humiliation, China was blowing off Biden’s effort at rapprochement, migrants continued to surge across the southern border, and Biden was struggling to get his agenda passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress. I wrote that the Biden team looked “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads. A flailing president is a failing president.”

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Jim Geraghty

Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review.

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The initial Democratic panic over this weekend’s New York Times poll has subsided a bit, and you’re seeing some of the usual suspects like Donna Brazile and Jim Messina assure Democrats that things looked grim for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, and Obama ended up winning comfortably. The implication is that Biden has just hit a rough patch, and the almost 81-year-old Biden will make a comeback comparable to Obama’s in the 2012 cycle.

Every now and then, I take a look at this assessment from Susan Glasser of The New Yorker from late September 2021. A couple other columnists and I had been hitting Biden pretty hard during that period. The withdrawal from Afghanistan had been a scandal and national humiliation, China was blowing off Biden’s effort at rapprochement, migrants continued to surge across the southern border, and Biden was struggling to get his agenda passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress. I wrote that the Biden team looked “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads. A flailing president is a failing president.”