For his part in his latest Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria muses over why President Joe Biden isn’t more popular:
I find President Biden’s unpopularity puzzling. He is rounding out his first year in the White House with the lowest end of first-year approval ratings of any elected president in modern times with the exception of Donald Trump. Why? Biden is a genial, likable person. Many of the policies he has pursued have been popular, some even with Republican support. The country is doing reasonably well economically, as measures such as declining unemployment, the stock market and interest rates demonstrate. So why did the latest CNN average of the polls have him at 45 percent?
which I suspect illustrates Mr. Zakaria’s and, perhaps, the WaPo’s detachment from the lives and expectations of ordinary people more than anything else.
I’ll try to explain it to him. First, Joe Biden has never been particularly popular. His attempts at running for president prior to 2020 were complete flops. Such popularity as he had in 2020 was largely predicated on his not being Donald Trump. Mission accomplished. He’s not Donald Trump.
My impression of Mr. Biden, far from his being “a genial, likable person”, is that he’s an insincere phony. He’d like people to believe that he’s a regular guy but everything I’ve heard from people who’ve had direct dealings with him is that he’s arrogant and imperious.
Next, there was no sanitary, pure, right way of exiting Afghanistan which is precisely why Presidents Obama and Trump didn’t do it. And leaving Afghanistan bucked the Washington establishment view which resulted in the sad, messy withdrawal getting considerable adverse press coverage.
An ancestor of mine gave what is (at least in Switzerland) a famous bit of advice: don’t set the fence too far. The funny thing about running on a platform of being the un-Trump, bringing peace, justice, and mercy to our southern border, restoring relationships with our allies, ending COVID-19, and a general return to normalcy and you fall short of those things while inflation runs hotter than it has in 40 years, people don’t like it. It may not help that it feels as though we’re on the brink of war with Russia and in space.
This post may sound more critical of President Biden than is actually my intent. I actually sympathize with him. I just think that people should have realized what they were going to get when they voted for Biden.
Somehow President Obama was able to get out of Iraq without it being a clusterfuck.
“I just think that people should have realized what they were going to get when they voted for Biden.”
My god, what have I done?
If one paid attention during the campaign last year, I don’t believe much of the Biden administration’s style/actions was surprising (or the outcomes that resulted) in 2021.
The main surprise is the vaccines didn’t turn out to be the silver bullet to end the pandemic they appeared to be in Nov 2020.
In Earth 2, if the vaccine trials had shown they were only 50% effective in preventing infection; there’s an alternate world where Biden/Democratic majorities in Congress didn’t act like they beaten COVID in the spring/summer.