At the New York Times, Peter Baker writes the following under the headline “As Midterms Near, Biden Faces a Nation as Polarized as Ever”:
As often happens whenever Mr. Biden finds a microphone and a willing audience, his family made a cameo appearance. This time it was his long-dead grandparents. “Every time I’d walk out of my grandpop’s house, he’d yell, ‘Joey, keep the faith,’” the president recounted. “My grandmother would yell, ‘No, Joey, spread it.’ Go spread the faith.”
Mr. Biden has been spreading the faith across the country in recent days, undaunted by the polls and prognosticators forecasting a devastating defeat for his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Faith has been Mr. Biden’s calling card in his nearly two years in office — faith in the system in which he has been a fixture for more than half a century, faith that he could repair the fissures of a broken society, faith that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump if they face off again in 2024.
President Biden isn’t “Joey” anymore; and he’s not facing down a polarized nation so much as he’s actively working to polarize it.
Biden won the White House, and his party has held both chambers of Congress during the first half of his term. He’s entitled, within the parameters of the Constitution, to seek to implement his agenda. That he’s done so does not convict him of sowing discord.
But the president delivered prepared remarks in January during which he cast opponents — to include Mitt Romney and Susan Collins — of his unconstitutional election-reform bill as today’s would-be slavers and segregationists.
“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” asked Biden. Before that, he characterized an anodyne election reform bill in Georgia — under which voter turnout records are presently being set — as “Jim Crow on steroids.”
These are frustrating, even perplexing times for Mr. Biden, who according to confidants had expected the fever of polarizing politics to have broken by now and was surprised that it had not. The presidency he envisioned, one where he presided over a moment of reconciliation, is not the presidency he has gotten. He thought that if he could simply govern well, everything would work out, which in hindsight strikes some around him as shockingly naïve if somewhat endearing.
What Biden has is the presidency he has created for himself, and Baker would better serve his readers by remembering that it’s a half-century-seasoned politician, not a blameless, if naïve, child at the helm of the executive branch.