It’s not lights out for Sleepy Joe just yet

The White House Press Corps had low expectations for President Joe Biden’s first anniversary news conference. “The guy’s only done nine press conferences since the inauguration,” one veteran complained, “he’s old, he can’t concentrate, and he won’t take many questions, I’m not bothering to go.”

As if to prove his detractors wrong the 79-year-old President stood at his podium for 1 hour and 53 minutes, taking spontaneous questions from all comers once the grandees from the TV networks and national press had been satisfied.

Much good it did him. His painfully nuanced responses to questions about Russia’s threat to Ukraine have been dubbed a gaffe, forcing next day clarification from the President and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

Meanwhile, the verdicts on his first year have already been written. Words such as “ruined”, “failed”, “unpopular”, and “mixed” are deployed by sympathetic commentators, even as they profess themselves delighted not to be covering Donald Trump’s second term.

The President points out that he is only a quarter of the way into a four-year term. He concedes that he has much still to do while boasting of major accomplishments by his administration in its first year. But many are already writing off “Sleepy Joe”, as Trump wickedly dubbed him.

All sides are gleefully piling in on a “report card” survey in which 37 per cent awarded Biden an “F” compared to 31 per cent who gave him an “A” or “B”; Trump was doing marginally better after his first year. The picture is similar in the approval ratings. 

At this stage in their presidency, Biden and Trump both fared worse than their immediate predecessors in the White House, somewhere around 35 per cent approval. 

Biden wasn’t just the anti-Trump candidate; his CV contained much apparently qualifying him for the top job. For elitists, he has spent half a century in Washington DC, mainly as a US Senator and Vice President, with an expertise in foreign policy. 

For populists, “Amtrak Joe” is the suburban man personified, raised poor in Pennsylvania, commuting daily to the Capitol by train from unglamorous Delaware.

These positives are currently negatives. At best, Biden is accused of blurting the unsayable: that Russia may well be on the brink of an incursion into Ukraine and that the Western Allies are arguing amongst themselves what to do if it happens.

Few would dispute his judgement, however, reinforced in visits to the region over the years, that the US was not winning in Afghanistan after a twenty-year occupation. It is also an unhappy historical fact that military withdrawals are almost always messy. 

Yet Biden has been vilified for sticking with a moderated version of Trump’s plan to pull out. As it should have done, the US evacuated more foreign nationals than any other.

Similarly, Biden could have been much more explicit about the divisions in NATO over Ukraine. President Macron is protesting loudly that neither NATO nor the US should speak for France in dealings with Moscow. Macron wants a separate place at the table for the European Union, even though all its non-neutral member states, including France, are also NATO members. Germany is refusing special clearance for British planes supplying military equipment to fly directly to Kyiv. 

The Green party leader, Annalena Baerbock, may be developing stronger linebacking sanctions. Berlin, however, is currently opposed to the plan being drawn up by the US to ban Russia from the SWIFT banking system if there is an attack. 

The last SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroder now works for the Russians and is a champion of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which when operational would directly undermine Ukraine’s international leverage.

Biden said what most onlookers believe – that Putin is unlikely to send 100,000 massed troops back to barracks without making some aggressive gesture. It was not an invitation to move in, Putin, the President warned of “extreme consequences… like he’s never seen before.” 

As he also stated, Ukraine is not on a path to membership of NATO — that decision was signalled at the Summit in Romania in 2008 — and so it is not covered by Article 5 of the treaty which would mean a full military response by its allies in the event of an attack. 

Unfairly, Biden’s critics are excusing their own indecision by contradicting themselves, simultaneously accusing the President of weakness and risking plunging into nuclear war with Russia.

Biden made the distinction that the President must stand back and not be “a Senator President”. His half a century of service on Capitol Hill has so far yielded limited dividends. At the same time, as he lamented the death of “my friend John McCain,” he noted that the Republicans have become more intransigent than they were during his eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice President. True to his pledge not to launch personal attacks he qualified his compliant claiming to “like” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader.   

Biden may have been disappointed, if not surprised, by the total obstructiveness of Republicans. The President who made the promise of “bringing America together” hasn’t even managed to unify his own Democratic party. 

Critics to his right declare he is “old as shit” and nowhere near radical enough; those Democrats in the US Senate thwarting his ambitions, claim he never had the mandate to be a transformative president. Two Democratic Senators from red-tinged states, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have obstructed most of his legislative efforts.

In his Inauguration Address on 20 January 2021, he pledged to build a more perfect union by confronting the challenges of Covid, racial injustice, climate change and political extremism. His report card on himself is “I didn’t over promise, I have probably out performed.” 

His administration has chalked up some solid legislative achievements in spite of dogged opposition. He introduced an American Rescue Plan which has helped millions of children out of poverty; a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan; some but not all of Build Back Better — which Biden now hopes to force through in “chunks” and 200 million Americans vaccinated from a standing start. 

Omicron has stymied the recovery from the pandemic as it has elsewhere. There are fears of inflation but the jobs market is booming, with an unemployment rate of 3.9 per cent.

Yet Biden is getting none of the credit. This month both the John Lewis Voting Reform Act and a bid to end the filibuster blocking legislation failed in Congress. 

Republican governments in at least nine states — including the battlegrounds Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona — have enacted voting reforms of their own, which may suppress turnout by minority, Democrat-leaning, voters. The general expectation is that his room to manoeuvre will be further curtailed at Congressional elections on 8 November. 

Past precedent is that the incumbent President’s party almost always takes a hit in the Mid-Terms. The Democrats are bracing to lose their narrow Majorities in both the House and the Senate.

There is also the succession question. Biden would be 82, the oldest ever president at his Second Inauguration. If he runs again, he has committed, “Yes”, to keep his poorly rated Vice President, Kamala Harris, on the ticket.

For all that Joseph Biden is unabashed. He puts his unpopularity down to external factors. “I think people are just tired, “ he explained, “they want to get back to normal… for many of us it [Covid] has been too much to bear”. He knows that the Republicans have a succession problem too. 

Trump, the man whose name only passed his lips once in two hours, still dominates the Republican Party. Even as “the last president” and his associates sink into serious legal difficulties in Manhattan and with the congressional 6 January inquiry, the Republicans have sold their soul to him. Beyond that negative energy, Biden asked repeatedly, “What are the Republicans for”. 

Covid crippled the 2020 Presidential contest. Neither Trump nor Biden was able to hit the campaign trail. Then this was considered to be to Biden’s advantage, but it has resulted in him being unable to introduce himself to the American people as their president. 

Biden, who has a long history as a retail politician, plans to change that now. As the pandemic recedes, he says “I’m going to get out of this place more often… into the public forum… I’m going to be deeply involved in these off year elections.” 

It is a Hail Mary pass by the cradle Irish American catholic, but if Sleepy Joe has the energy, if world events play to his strengths, it may be time for serious minded commentators to look up from writing their premature obituaries. 

This week the White House Press Corps completely missed a rather good Biden Joke. Was he bothered, James Rosen, ex-Fox News now of Newsmax, wanted to know that 49 per cent of the American people polled, questioned his “cognitive fitness”? “I’ve no idea”, the President replied.