Mulligan

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius says that Joe Biden is badly in need of a “do over”:

Labor Day always feels like the start of a new year — as classes begin, the season turns, and the joys and miseries of summer recede. The Biden administration badly needs that sort of new beginning.

This was a painful August for President Biden. He promised competent government, restored international leadership, an end to the covid-19 pandemic and a resurgent economy. But after last month’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan, a coronavirus spike caused by the delta variant, and a slowdown in job growth, those pledges seem questionable. Polls show a significant drop in Biden’s approval rating.

We’re living in a seesaw world. Biden got off to a fast start in his first six months, with coronavirus infections falling sharply and the economy rapidly gaining strength. After his June trip to Europe, Biden’s line, “America is back,” seemed plausible. But trend lines are fickle, with politics and pandemics. A bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan amplified other bad news, and Biden’s presidency suddenly seemed to be sputtering.

and he, too, concludes with the “c” word:

Competence begins at home. But the White House wants to demonstrate that despite anger overseas about the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, allies still need and want U.S. leadership. Look for a Biden push on vaccine diplomacy at the U.N. General Assembly this month, a major new initiative with “Quad” partners in Asia (India, Japan and Australia) and a new effort to galvanize the “techno-democracies” through the October meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The White House was battered last month by bad luck, bad policy and bad implementation. The surprising thing, given this gut-wrenching reversal for an administration that had been riding high, is the relative lack of internal backbiting. In other administrations, the leaks by now would have been flowing like a fire hose.

Biden’s inner team sometimes seems more like a Senate staff than a typical elbows-out administration. Congeniality has its advantages. But when mistakes happen, as they did in August, problems need to get fixed. Otherwise, the boss — and perhaps dozens of Democratic legislators — will pay the price.

I think he’s dreaming. It’s looking increasingly as though the internal conflicts in the Democratic Party, which have always been quite apparent, will torpedo any agenda that President Biden may have had. The Congressional progressives won’t settle for anything less than their ambitious and extravagant spending plans while the more centrist members of the caucus are balking at the price tag. That is not a surprise. It has always been apparent.

And there are no mulligans in politics. Can President Biden make better decisions going forward than he has made since January? Or is he caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the wings of his own party?