President Joe Biden is searching for something to save him from himself. After more than three years in office, Biden has dug himself into a hole out of which he can’t get out. At the bottom of the pit that is his presidency, the only tool he has with him is a shovel. Clearly, he needs someone to throw him a line, but increasingly, it appears no one is going to.
Biden’s latest piece of bad news came last week when the Federal Reserve neither cut interest rates nor gave an indication when it might begin doing so. This follows the bad news of the last two months when inflation, Bidenflation, came in higher than hoped.
Politically, this means another month lost for a possible economic jolt that Biden desperately needs. It also means that even if rate cuts begin as early as April, something that virtually no one now expects, there would be less than seven months for the effect to flow through to voters’ perception. And that perception is currently bad: According to RealClearPolitics’s national polling average on March 26, Biden has just a 39.5% approval rating on the economy, versus 57.6% disapproval.
Biden’s deep economic hole is hardly the only one he has dug for himself with voters.
His prevaricating policy on the Israel-Hamas war is another. In a black-and-white conflict between America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East and an avowed and unrepentant terrorist organization that launched an attack on innocent civilians and still holds unknown numbers of Israelis hostage, Biden’s policy is fifty shades of gray.
Desperate for a ceasefire, he dangled its prospect before the world for the simple reason that he politically needs it. This is particularly true within his own party, in which Democrats’ influential radical Left has none of Biden’s ambiguity: They oppose Israel completely. Trapped between what is right and his Left, Biden’s approval rating on his handling of this war is an abysmal 32.3%, versus a 60.7% disapproval rating.
Biden is also flailing when it comes to our own pressing national security matters. Biden desperately embraced a border deal that would have allowed him to claim victory without reclaiming the southern border. That he managed to open the border on his own but somehow cannot close it without legislation is beside the point. His refusal to act now is due to the fact that he politically needs someone else to take action and thereby absolve him from responsibility when he faces his radical Left. Until then, he’s stuck in his hole, with just a 32.2% approval rating on immigration versus a 63.3% disapproval rating.
At his State of the Union address, he again sought a lifeline, this time from Republicans. But as he repeatedly goaded them on issue after issue, hoping to provoke a response that would make him look like the only adult in the room instead of just an octogenarian, they refused to take the bait. Instead, the outburst came from the gallery where the father of a fallen U.S. Marine shouted to remind the president of his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. It echoed in yet another Biden hole, this time on foreign policy, for which Biden’s approval rating is just 37% versus 59.8% disapproval.
Besides repeated failure, another pattern emerges from these episodes: Biden is desperately seeking help. Having won the presidency with 51.3% of the popular vote in 2020, Biden now registers just 45% support in RCP’s average of two-way polls against the man he beat four years ago. In five-way polls, Biden’s average support is just 39.4%, and in the all-important battleground state average, Biden registers just 45.3% support while trailing in each and every state’s individual average.
While looking at his poll numbers, it is obvious Biden has little more than core Democratic support, which registered at 37% in 2020 exit polls.
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But help isn’t coming. The economy? If anything, expect growth to slow as the interest rates that Bidenflation provoked take their toll on economic growth. In the Israel-Hamas war? Biden and his Senate surrogate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), appear more intent on alienating our ally than producing a positive outcome. On the southern border? Expect more of the same from a Biden administration that refuses to act. On foreign policy? Name one country — China, Russia, or Iran — that is likely to offer a win to Biden in response to his feckless policy.
To paraphrase the famous commercial line of the past — “Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” — Biden has dug, and he can’t get himself out. He needs something big to change the political calculus. With the election just over seven months away, it is increasingly unlikely that anything is coming.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
