Even the Biden administration’s areas of relative success are surrounded by counterbalancing problems or crises.
Every administration tries to spin away its problems by following the advice of the old song, accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative. The problem for the Biden administration is even their areas of relative success are surrounded by counterbalancing problems or crises.
Yes, unemployment is low, just 3.9 percent nationally according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Normally, that would be terrific news. But the labor force participation rate is low by historical standards, and we have the opposite problem of too many workers for too few jobs. We have too few workers for too many jobs – 10.7 million or so unfilled jobs, at last count. Americans have noticed the signs in store windows change from “help wanted” to “We’re hiring!” to “Please be patient, we are short-staffed.”
And Americans are understandably less focused on the low unemployment rate when inflation is the highest in decades and gas prices and food prices keep skyrocketing. Throw in intermittent empty store shelves because of the supply chain crisis, the preexisting labor shortage, worker absences because of the Omicron wave, and Americans can’t understand why the president would want to take a victory lap on the state of the economy right now. Nobody cares much about the unemployment rate when they feel like they can’t afford anything anymore.
Yes, the vaccine effort has been unparalleled in American history – more than 535 million shots administered, more than 75 percent of eligible Americans have had at least one shot, and more than 87.4 percent of all American adults have had at least one shot. It’s just too bad that the vaccines don’t actually prevent infections; they mitigate the effects of infection and drastically reduce the likelihood of death.
Here Biden can’t really celebrate too loudly because he already wildly raised expectations with his absurd pledge to “shut down the virus” a year ago. The Omicron variant was thankfully less deadly but wildly contagious, meaning millions of Americans got sick at the same time after the Christmas holidays. That problem could have been mitigated better if the country had enough tests, but Biden once again over-promised and under-delivered. The government is only now sending instant tests, now that the Omicron wave has peaked in many parts of the country.
Americans are still fighting about wearing masks, still working remotely, still dealing with closed schools in places like central Texas, Spokane, Wash.; Portland, Ore., Kalamazoo, Mich., and Bristol, Tenn. No, it’s nowhere near as bad as it was in 2020. But America’s schools still feel more shut down than the virus. The vaccination effort succeeded in getting a lot of vaccines into arms, but it didn’t succeed by the measurement of ending the pandemic’s oppressive grip on American life.
And then there’s foreign policy. Yes, Biden gets along better with European leaders better than his predecessor, and he shows up to the international conferences and says all the right things in his speeches. Walter Russell Mead characterizes the Biden worldview as the “Be Nice to Europe” policy.
But it’s hard to see many dividends from the Biden approach yet. The aggressive regime in Beijing certainly hasn’t changed any of its ways. Neither North Korea or Iran are interested in making any concessions on their nuclear programs. And this is all separate from the debacle that was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
On the campaign trail, Biden boasted, “Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him” and pledged, “Unlike Trump, I’ll defend our democratic values and stand up to autocrats like Putin.” And yet, somehow, Putin doesn’t seem all that intimidated or deterred by Biden, now, does he?
In this light, it’s not surprising that Joe Biden would rather talk about Roe v. Wade or Steve Doocy or a GM plant in Michigan, anything but the growing list of problems that anger and infuriate Americans.