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“[President Joe] Biden's approval rating in [a new CNN] poll stands at 38%, with 62% disapproving. His approval ratings for handling the economy (30%) and inflation (25%) are notably lower… With midterm elections approaching, the poll finds no indication that Biden's standing with the public is improving -- and among some critical constituencies, it is worsening.” CNN
The left criticizes Biden’s delayed responses to crises but is skeptical of a potential primary challenge.
“Two weeks after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, three months after a draft of that opinion leaked to the press, and nearly two years after a Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death made the elimination of that right more likely than not, President Joe Biden entered the chat…
“Describing the Dobbs decision as ‘an exercise in raw political power’ from an ‘out of control’ court, Biden [on July 8] signed an executive order that would safeguard certain reproductive health services, protect patients’ private medical records, form an interagency reproductive health care task force, and more…
“[These things] should have been done five seconds after the Dobbs decision dropped—or at least before the first Democratic fundraising email went out… The fumbling about for a spell before he awakens to the fire is a recurring pattern.”
Jim Newell, Slate
“In a year of crises—Roe, Ukraine, inflation—Biden has been notably tucked away, his major communications coming in newspaper op-eds (another, Monday morning, detailed his goals for a diplomatic trip to the Middle East). With Roe, the situation is particularly galling, given the long lead time the administration was given. That Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, has recently emerged as the administration’s most effective spokesperson on a range of issues, is itself a damning indictment of the administration’s messaging…
“Biden appears to be trapped in a vicious cycle. With his approval rating plummeting, he and his advisers appear to be gripped with anxiety that doing anything will only make things worse. And so he says little and does nothing, hoping that voters will blame Republicans for what’s ailing the country—or at least recognize the existential threat they pose to American democracy—and vote for Democrats in November. It clearly isn’t working…
“To achieve their electoral goals, Democrats need to give voters reasons to believe, and the only way to reverse Biden’s sliding popularity is for him to step forward and start providing these reasons.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic
“There are two years to go before the next presidential election and already there's an effort underway to replace Joe Biden at the head of the Democrats' ticket. RootsAction, a progressive group, announced this week it will run an ad campaign aimed at blocking his renomination. ‘Our immediate goal within the Democratic Party is to 'dump Biden,' much as the anti-Vietnam-War forces among Democrats set out to 'dump [Lyndon] Johnson' in 1967, which led antiwar candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy to enter the race,’ the group says on its website…
“It's true that Johnson withdrew from the 1968 race in the face of massive intra-party opposition, famously declaring: ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.’ But the eventual winner of the White House in that election was neither McCarthy nor Kennedy, who was assassinated after the California primary: It was Richard Nixon…
“Over the last 60 years, intraparty challenges to sitting presidents have succeeded mostly in damaging those presidents. But they haven't led to short-term electoral success for the challengers: Their party lost the White House each time.”
Joel Mathis, The Week
The right argues that Biden’s low approval is due to both his own missteps and those of the Democratic party.
The right argues that Biden’s low approval is due to both his own missteps and those of the Democratic party.
“‘End of the quote. Repeat the line.’ Such is the senescence of the 46th president of the United States that when he is not flat-out misspeaking, it is because he is reading the cues as he stumbles through the see-Jane-run prose of White House speechwriters. Like life at 79, the teleprompts come at you fast…
“Through a half-century of rhetorical misadventure, Biden has never been taken seriously — including by President Barack Obama, who, confoundingly, plucked Biden from the scrap heap to be his running mate after serving with him in the Senate . . . and famously slipped an aide a ‘Shoot. Me. Now.’ note he’d scribbled during one of Biden’s logorrheic discourses…
“[But] As with nearly everything befalling his train wreck of a term (which has ‘just’ 30 months to go!), Joe Biden is guilty more of accelerating a corrosive trend than of causing it… It is not just Biden but the presidency itself whose power to persuade, and just as important to instill fear in rogue regimes, has suffered diminution.”
Andrew McCarthy, New York Post
“Democrats aren’t suddenly alarmed by the discovery of unexpected evidence that the president is too old for the job. They are alarmed by the discovery of entirely predictable evidence that he is too inept for the job. It’s not his advanced age that has Democrats worried, it’s his advancing unpopularity. You can guarantee that if Mr. Biden had an approval rating that was closer to his years of age (79) than his months in office (18), we’d be hearing endless stories of his physical fitness and mental acuity…
“The unfortunate reality—for the rest of us as well as for Democrats—is that at nearly 80, Mr. Biden is as fit now to be president as he has ever been… Mr. Biden hasn’t lost his capacities. He never had them. His long political career before the presidency was remarkable for its unremarkability. It is a pretty good indicator of the quality of your political judgment when most of the memorable things you did in your career you have subsequently repudiated—pro-life votes in the 1970s and later, the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill showdown, the 1994 crime bill, the 1996 welfare reform, support for the Iraq war in 2002.”
Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal
“Inflation is eating away at Democrats just as it is at purchasing power. Would it be any lower if one of Biden’s 2020 Democratic rivals had won? It’s more plausible that the giant government spending initiatives favored by Sanders would have pushed it higher. Biden started his presidency with the view that he needed to go big on spending to avoid Obama’s alleged error of providing too little fiscal stimulus to the economy. In retrospect, that judgment was mistaken. At the time, though, most Democrats held it…
“Liberal frustration at Biden over abortion is especially misplaced. Maybe the administration should have had its executive order ready for the day the Supreme Court discarded its 1973 abortion-rights precedent instead of waiting two weeks. But any order would have been underwhelming: There is almost nothing a president can do on his own to replicate the broad right established by Roe v. Wade…
“It’s easier to point fingers than to acknowledge that liberals should blame themselves for inflationary spending policies, unrealistic legislative goals and social-issue maximalism.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg
