In this, the first term of the Biden presidency, US inflation is down to its lowest figure in two years. Consumer confidence is up. The US/Mexico border has not been “overrun”, as predicted by the right after Covid restrictions were ended.
In fact, immigration has gone down.
Technically, in some instances, America is in FDR territory, such has been Biden’s turnaround of the US economy. Even the left wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorses the guy for 2024.
Yet, his approval rating is between 37 and 40%. That is Jimmy Carter territory. In other words: Joe Biden has the second-lowest approval rating of any POTUS ever in office. But is he as bad as Jimmy Carter is believed to have been?
Being old enough to recall the Carter presidency, I can also recall the stagflation he inherited and the recession we all lived through as he tried to tame it. It was brutal. There was also the taking of the US hostages at the embassy in Tehran, and Carter’s failed attempt to rescue them.
Ronald Reagan ran for president on that and took 44 states in 1980.
Biden’s record should suggest that he could win a similar landslide. But it will not happen. Why?
First, out of the blue, come what could be disruptors to the president’s re-election. They come from his own side of the political spectrum.
There is the wacky and malignant RFK Jr, who the MAGA Republican congresspeople recently invited to the House to testify in a hearing on censorship. He denied everything that he has said – on tape – about vaccinations; Jews; the Chinese.
Other members of the Kennedy family then took to the airwaves to denounce him because they know how potent, still, the Kennedy name is.
But Bobby Kennedy Jr is still fund-raising to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for POTUS and polling at around 15%.
And back again, are the Green Party. In 2016, they fielded Jill Stein, who seemed to make her dislike of Hillary Clinton her chief campaign point. Hillary was just BAD and anybody else would do. Stein’s campaign could have been funny if it had not been so dangerous, so vote-sapping.
In 2024, the Greens might be running another no-hoper, the distinguished African American professor of African American history, activist; lecturer, man-on-TV-if-you-let-him: Professor Cornel West.
As highly erudite and well-read about his nation’s history as he undoubtedly is, Dr West has a snowball’s chance in Death Valley of being elected president of the United States. But election is not his point.
It is the act and the fact of running for the highest office in the land that is relevant, the expression of dissent that truly matters. Some will vote for this.
Back within the Democratic Party camp, in a manner of speaking, is Joe Manchin, the senator from Kentucky who has worked with Republicans on everything from gun control to abortion to immigration and opposed Barack Obama’s green energy policies.
He spoke recently at a No Labels event. This is the third-party option for those who don’t want to vote for either of the main two parties.
No Labels, rather than the Greens, are considered to be the spoiler party of 2024. And they could put Trump back into office.
Their thing is bi-partisan and centrist. So they say. Rumour has it that they are funded by some conservatives. With deep pockets.
Some evidence gathered by pollsters indicates that a Biden v Trump rematch would set up No Labels and the Green Party to pull support away from Biden. This would hand the election to Trump, who plans a sweeping overhaul of the presidency giving it – ie him – more executive powers.
Don the Con already put three conservatives on the Supreme Court bench, for life. This was something that Hillary warned was the real stake in 2016 if he had won. She was right.
Donny has recently hinted that his “passionate” cult may reenact their January 6 protests of 2021 if he is convicted at any of the three trials that he faces so far. “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters,” he said. This guy uses the nickels and dimes that his supporters send him to pay his lawyers, when he chooses to pay them. All in full view. His cult loves him for it. “What a guy!” they marvel.
So why is this malignant narcissistic so-and-so even being considered by the Republican Party? And why can’t Biden catch a break?
The chief reason, I believe, is the hyper-partisanship that the US is caught up in.
Fellow women: do you remember how it was at school when the girl nobody liked couldn’t really do anything right? And you just didn’t like her, not because she had done anything wrong or bad. But because she wasn’t in your club; your set; talked “funny”, or wore her hair wrong. Boys are just as bad.
The people opposed to the Democrats are deeply opposed. They simply don’t want to know. Thus Joe Biden, doing a good job at a hard time, is caught up in an era in which compromise barely exists. Our era.
People are trying to build bridges, though. There are efforts across the country, as one senator said recently, to learn how to “face your MAGA uncle at dinner when he starts on his election conspiracies.”
But not enough efforts. This is how bad things are right now in the US.
We humans look at our struggles and tend to believe we are living in the worst time ever. We lean towards the bad stuff.
We also do not really know yet how the pandemic and the brutal lockdown that it engendered has affected us.
Arguably you could say that the Black Death forged the Protestant Revolt, which created a new stance not only towards God and central authority, but gave the ordinary person, through the printing press, an opportunity to access the world by themselves.
The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919, which wiped out a great deal of the world’s population, could have contributed to the rise of totalitarianism. And right now, post-Covid, the US is as divided as it was at the outbreak of the civil war.
There is, as of now, no bridge builder in sight.
