Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously

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A year that started with an insurrection at the Capitol is ending with more than eight hundred thousand Americans dead in the covid pandemic, as a contagious new variant, Omicron, produces the biggest wave of cases yet. Inflation is the highest it has been in decades. The twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan concluded with an embarrassing and botched American retreat. The Republican Party, rather than rejecting the defeated ex-President, has redoubled its commitment to Trump and Trumpism, purged dissenters, and embraced outright denialism, whether of vaccines or election results. Who’d have thought that 2020 would ever look good by comparison?

Joe Biden, taking office amid multiple crises, was never going to have it easy. He campaigned on the promise of restoration—of sanity to our national politics, of competence to our governance, and of civility to our public life. He has lived up to his personal part of the bargain, at least, returning dignity to the White House, rejecting the inflammatory lies and demagoguery of his predecessor. The nation is no longer subject to early-morning and late-night tweetstorms of Presidential invective.

Many of the national indicators have improved, too: more than seventy per cent of American adults are vaccinated; there are promising new treatments for covid; unemployment has fallen, wages have risen, the economy has rebounded, and the stock markets have hit record highs that would have had Trump beating his chest. Biden managed to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress, with more than a trillion dollars in new spending, something that Trump never delivered. All of this, to some Biden backers, is an example of a President who “won big with a bad hand,” as David Frum put it the other day.

But the national mood is sour, and understandably so. Sanity, competence, and civility have not exactly returned to Washington; normalcy is not just around the corner. Biden, it is now clear, promised what he couldn’t deliver in a nation divided against itself. He trafficked in hope that was arguably as misleading in its own way as Trump’s lies. More than four hundred thousand Americans have died of covid since Trump left office—many of them because they refused to get a free, lifesaving vaccine. More than two-thirds of Republicans to this day refuse to accept that Biden is the legitimately elected President, preferring Trump’s Big Lie to the uncomfortable truth of his defeat. There is no restoration possible in such a country.

Republicans, having turned predictions of Biden’s failure into a self-fulfilling prophecy, already proclaim him the second coming of Jimmy Carter: a weak and doomed one-term President, besieged by inflation and a national malaise that defies the actual economic indicators. The overheated declarations last spring that this President was the progressive reincarnation of F.D.R. or L.B.J. now seem as dated as the widespread expectation in both parties that Trump, defeated in November, 2020, and disgraced on January 6th, could never have a political future.

So forget the predictions. They’re garbage. Any time you are tempted to buy into them, think back to your January 7th self. Did you imagine a world where it was even possible that Liz Cheney, not Donald Trump, would be the Republican leader purged as a result of the insurrection at the Capitol? Or think back to the moment when you got the covid vaccine and perhaps cried, as the young woman in line in front of me did, at the thought of finally being liberated from the pandemic? Did you think you’d be spending New Year’s Eve at home alone again, wondering where to score a covid test, and watching helplessly as thousands of Americans continue to die each week of a disease for which many of them refused to be vaccinated?

This, as much as anything, must be why Biden, who started the year with nearly sixty per cent of Americans approving of his job performance, now has the lowest rating of any modern President at this point in their tenure—except Donald Trump. Back in the 2020 campaign, Biden effectively made the case that Trump had failed on the pandemic. But he did not reckon fully with the havoc that Trump’s supporters could deal to his own efforts to stop the virus. He did not foresee that so many Americans would risk even death itself for the cause of owning the libs.

On July Fourth, Biden still believed in the impossible. He held a party on the White House lawn to celebrate “Independence Day and Independence from covid-19,” as his address that day was tragically mistitled.

His Presidency has yet to recover. As of December, in fact, his positive rating stood at just forty-three per cent, according to Gallup. And not all of the political wounds can be pinned on recalcitrant Republicans and crazed anti-vaxxers. Biden and his Administration were at times slow to recognize unpleasant realities—whether the emergence of inflation, the likelihood of a swift Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, or the persistence of vaccine resistance—and equally slow to impose policies that might mitigate them. The oldest President ever elected, Biden at age seventy-nine is not the doddering caricature that Republicans have sought to make him. But he has not yet figured out how to make an effective case for himself and his Presidency.

I lived in Russia for four years, where decades of life under the Soviet Union had taught a cynical population a truth that Americans only now seem to be learning for themselves: it can always get worse.

But Biden is an American optimist—he is now, and has always been one. Having overcome much loss in his own life and bounced back from so many reversals, his most endearing quality may be his refusal to accept defeat even when faced with insurmountable obstacles. He has proven that sometimes hope can, in fact, triumph over experience. So I’ll say it again: forget the predictions.

But the only thing I’m sure of about 2022 is that we should prepare to be surprised all over again.