SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF BIDEN
Success and Failures of Biden.
President Biden and his team have begun responding faster and more sharply to provocative comments and actions by former president Donald Trump and his allies, potentially preparing the ground for Biden’s expected reelection announcement early next year.
The rapid responses, coming in the weeks since Democrats outperformed expectations in the November midterms, come as some Democratic strategists see a political advantage in pointedly — and frequently — drawing a contrast with Trump, the Republican Party, and the Republican lawmakers poised to take over the House of Representatives.
But then let's look at Biden's Successes and failures as well.
The story of Biden’s first term so far is a roller coaster complicated and contradictory, with remarkable achievements and enormous disappointment. His administration oversaw the most successful vaccine rollout in history, ushering in a post-pandemic sense of normalcy — yet the country is gearing up for new worrisome variants as it heads into winter.And Biden helped mitigate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — while also strengthening the transatlantic alliance and growing NATO — but he did so against a backdrop in which rising prices, fueled in part by his policies, formed the fabric of Americans’ daily lives.
For the man who had promised to heal the soul of the nation, the presidency proved a test of his own. Some people closest to the president describe an administration that achieved significant victories while repeatedly running up against the limits of the federal bureaucracy, a tissue-thin majority in Congress and a deeply divided nation. Aides also often failed to anticipate and plan for worst-case scenarios and regularly set expectations above what they could achieve. Biden and his team were elected on the promise of a new era of competent governance, only to find that the most rigorous science and best expert advice could not protect the country from new waves of disease and economic hardship.
Ultimately Biden achieved much of what he promised as a candidate. He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, amid a record pace of judicial appointees that placed more Black women on appellate courts than all prior presidents combined. With the narrowest control of Congress in decades, he passed laws on covid relief, infrastructure, climate change, manufacturing, gun regulation and prescription drug prices that in most cases had spent years on Democratic wish lists. A precision strike he ordered killed the long-standing head of al-Qaeda, and he continues to hold together a jittery coalition of nations to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, bolstering his promise to restore American leadership abroad.
But as inflation rose and coronavirus variants battered the country, he also lost the support of the public, with his approval rating plummeting to below 40 percent this summer — landing him among the presidents with the all-time lowest ratings at the same point during their first terms — before rebounding somewhat in September to match the approval ratings of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton at the same point in their presidencies.
