I am a big fan of President Biden, but his poll numbers keep sliding.
Americans, including many of the people who voted for him, are not happy with him. They want him to someone different.
I am activist and impatient for change in the US. Change in equality, in vouting and many other progressive areas.
Americans think they misjudged the man they sent to the White House. I don’t share that view.
As president, he has been exactly who he said he’d be.
Last year, most Democrats had a single goal: to get rid of Donald Trump. He was degrading the country and possibly destroying it.
We now have chaos and we want relief. We thought Biden the man who could provide it, the man who could loosen Trump’s stranglehold on our society. So we settled on the elder statesman.
Biden pitched electability — moderation rather than transformation — and voters liked it. He was projecting a sense of “calm resolve.”
There have been successes and positive news under Biden — but Americans are now dealing with a virus that won’t go away, rising inflation, progressive legislation that is either stalled like the Build Back Better Bill or abandoned like a federal police reform bill.
The Biden administration needs to pivot because the calm approach is not the way the world works anymore, not in this moment, not after Trump.
If you put a megaphone down, someone else will pick it up.
For example, Biden has participated in just 10 one-on-one interviews in the first nine months of his presidency. Barack Obama had participated in 131 interviews.
He can do this, he was far more outspoken as vice president, giving at least twice the number of interviews by his first October in office as he has while president,
There is a the idea that the president is voiceless and vacant. 42 percent of registered voters say that Biden has accomplished less than they expected. More than a quarter of Democrats felt this way.
Biden IS being the president he campaigned to be. But conditions on the ground have changed. What the American people want from their leader has changed.
And I think Biden is going to have to change with them.
Biden’s first year in office is far from a failure. But an alternate reality is growing in the minds of voters, and Biden himself is doing too little to squash it.
He needs to be more publicly present. Agreeing to an interview Wednesday with ABC’s David Muir was a start, but just one appearance won’t correct a season of shirking.
He also is being stabbed in his back by his own party members. Senator Manchin dealt a devastating blow to Biden’s Build Back Better Act, after an understanding with the President.
Also, Black leaders told the White House that it is past time for President Joe Biden to put his full weight behind voting rights legislation.
They want Biden to be more aggressive and public about this. They said the White House is procrastinating while states are changing their laws.
When Biden was riding high, the narrative for his administration was clear and positive.
Democrats embraced the covid relief measure and people were getting money as earlier stimulus payments were topped up to $2,000.
The vaccine program went great guns after some hiccups, and the end of the covid crisis was in sight — or so we thought until vaccine resistance coupled with the delta variant led to new surges of infection.
The economy roared back and is still in decidedly positive territorory.
Biden needs to restore the sense he created early on that he knows where he’s going. This requires refining his original objectives in response to events.
He needs to accept that Republicans will do him no favors between now and the 2022 elections and turn this to his advantage.
He should threaten that he might support rolling back the filibuster like he did to allow Democrats to pass a short-term increase in the debt ceiling.
Biden should press Republicans about what benefits they propose to deny to Americans who need them.
Do they want less child care? Less health coverage? More expensive drugs? No tax breaks under the child tax credit?
He also needs to be more upbeat in describing the stronger, fairer and more prosperous country he’s trying to build and bring to life a country less divided — socially, regionally and racially — by creating opportunity where it doesn’t exist now.
Tell Republicans and Trump what they are doing should be called out as wrong and do it loud and forcefully.
By recognizing that rallying the nation behind the cause of democracy is now his most important task, Biden would do more than reboot his presidency and give his party a fighting chance in 2022. He’d be doing what he was elected to do.