Advice for President Biden

Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston has some advice for President Biden:

On Covid, the people have specific complaints. They don’t support your effort to extend vaccine mandates and they don’t think your administration was prepared for the Omicron variant. Medical professionals have noted the failure to ramp up the procurement of home tests during the summer and fall of 2021. About 7 in 10 Americans believe that the information coming out of your pandemic task force has been confusing.

If I were you, I would pay attention to these complaints. About 1 in 5 Americans will never get vaccinated, and trying to force them has backfired. It’s time to accept this reality. If the coronavirus task force’s weekly news conferences are creating confusion, pause them until you solve the problem. Rather than a steady stream of defensive statements from senior officials, admit mistakes. People are asking what happened to the tens of billions of dollars appropriated for testing. They deserve a straight answer.

As for inflation: Blaming it on corporate greed may thrill progressives, but most economists and commentators, including Democrats, aren’t buying it. Two-thirds of people are blaming supply-chain issues, which is a lot closer to the truth. I’d be doing regular events highlighting your administration’s efforts to clear the backlog at ports and mobilize new truckers to fill the gaps in the transportation system. Even if progress is slow, people will give you credit for focusing on what they think is important.

In the long run, legislation does matter. But your legislative agenda has hit a wall, which won’t collapse because you blow your trumpet louder. You aren’t Joshua, and a miracle isn’t in the offing. It’s time to set aside what you want and take what you can get.

This can’t happen until you stop subcontracting your priorities to the Democratic congressional leadership. If you don’t know already, find out which elements of Build Back Better dissenting Senate Democrats will accept—and make that the core of your bill. Support the nascent bipartisan efforts to fix the Electoral Count Act of 1887, whose dangerous flaws enabled Donald Trump’s failed effort to get his vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Get the House to pass its version of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which could help mitigate the computer chip shortage.

And about that speech in Georgia:

Speaking of which: I don’t know who advised you to deliver last week’s Georgia voting-rights speech, but I do know that it was a political fiasco. Many members of your own party regarded it as over-the-top and unpresidential. Others saw it as empty rhetoric. It changed few minds, and none in the Senate. It did nothing to reinforce the brand of politics that earned you the Democratic nomination and the presidency. And it made you look weak.

I think he must be thinking about some other Joe Biden. Nothing in President Biden’s present circumstances or Joe Biden’s history would lead him to do any of those things although you may notice the similarity between his advice and what I’ve been saying around here. President Biden is acting precisely as Joe Biden has throughout his career, tacking to the center of the Democratic Party and that center is shifting to the left practically on a daily basis. He can’t alienate the progressives as long as he plans to run again in 2024 (all presidents plan to run again). It’s from that caucus that primary challenges are most likely to emerge.

I hold to the antiquated view that politics is local, try as the folks in DC might to nationalize everything. Running good candidates that can win will help Democrats’ fortunes in the mid-terms but they will have President Biden dragging them down. The harder they try to tie their Republican opponents to Donald Trump, the more likely it is to be a wave election and I don’t mean a Blue wave.

My advice would be a little different: maintain a low profile. The less he talks, the higher his approval rating gets. He has a pretty decent floor of approval and he can avoid raising his disapproval by being more decorous than Trump. I have no confidence he’ll take that advice, either. Alice Roosevelt’s wisecrack about her famous father applies pretty much equally to all presidents.