Opinion: Biden is foundering because Democrats made two major misjudgments

December 2021 is obviously not shaping up as President Biden had 
planned.

Last February, Biden told a CNN town hall that “by next 
Christmas, I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, 
God willing, than we are today. … A year from now, I think that 
there’ll be significantly fewer people having to be socially 
distanced, having to wear a mask.” Instead, America will be 
getting a very nasty Christmas present of the omicron variant. 
More contagious than anything seen so far, it’s clearly able to 
evade at least some of the immune defenses acquired from 
vaccines or prior infection.

Then there are the other big nasties under our collective tree: 
soaring homicides, a brewing conflict over Ukraine and the 
highest inflation rate the United States has experienced in 
nearly 40 years. In his stocking, Biden will get an approval 
rating hovering in the low 40s, lower than that of any modern 
president at this point in their first term other than Donald 
Trump.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Reality happens to every president, of course, but reality has 
been happening especially hard to Biden. Nor can this be blamed 
entirely on the fickle finger of fate. The Biden administration 
has foundered in part because Democrats misjudged how much 
difference policy could make — underestimating the effects of 
economic policy, while overestimating the effects of pandemic 
control.

Back in January, there was a very clear theory of the incoming 
Biden presidency. All he really had to do was to not be an 
incompetent, impulsive pandemic-denier.

“Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus,” he told 
Americans in March. “Tell the truth. Follow the scientists and 
the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our 
government to fulfill its most important function, which is 
protecting the American people — no function more important.”

And there it was: Joe Biden was going to be the guy who used the 
healing power of science to give Americans their lives back. 
Americans would respond with a burst of gratitude, and Biden 
would use that political capital to pass big, ambitious programs 
that would please his political coalition and further endear him 
to voters. Cue the roaring applause, the starry-eyed crowd 
chanting “Four! More! Years!”

To some extent, of course, the administration was obviously just 
planning to take credit for rolling out the vaccines that his 
predecessor had funded and pushed through expedited regulatory 
review. But Democrats also clearly believed that better policy 
could turn the pandemic around, because for the left, this has 
been a running theme throughout the pandemic: “the Party of 
Science” vs. a “death cult” that bore almost all of the blame 
for America’s continuing woes.

They had a point. It does seem likely that Trump’s resistance to 
pandemic precautions is the reason that the United States, which 
started out with a lot of advantages that should have protected 
us, nonetheless ended up with the worst death rate of any rich 
country. But looking at other countries in our economic class, 
it seems clear that, absent Trump’s deranged denialism, the 
United States would probably nonetheless have lost at least half 
a million people — and would still now be facing the most 
contagious variant yet.

The country is swiftly reaching the point at which more 
Americans will have died from covid-19 under Biden than under 
Trump. It is not surprising that polls show voters losing 
confidence in Biden’s handling of the pandemic. Much of the 
decline is unfair, of course (such is the lot of presidents). 
But in focusing so much of the blame for the pandemic on Trump 
and Republicans, Democrats and their allies raised the 
expectations that have now been brutally disappointed.

Yet, even as Democrats were overestimating how big a difference 
policy could make, they were underestimating policy effects 
elsewhere, notably the inflation that resulted when massive 
relief spending collided with a kinked-up supply chain. 
Democrats had been warned of the risks of a too-big relief 
package, even by some of their own economists. But the left had 
spent the past few years convincing themselves that old-
fashioned concepts such as balanced budgets and controlling 
inflation were irrelevant to the modern world.

Though the mistakes on the pandemic and on inflation might seem 
to be of opposite kinds, in fact a common thread links them: a 
tendency to treat a policy’s intended effects as its actual 
ones. Throughout the pandemic, blue-state Democrats tended to 
overweight policy differences between blue and red states, and 
underweight variables such as seasonal weather patterns; what 
mattered was that blue states were trying to do something, and 
red states were not. And that’s also what Democrats paid 
attention to when it came to economic policy: the goals the 
administration was trying to achieve, not the inconvenient side 
effects no one wanted. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, reality had 
other plans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/18/biden-
democrats-mistakes-inflation-pandemic/