Inside the White House, there is still optimism: “President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.”
One year ago, President Joe Biden stood in front of a U.S. Capitol that still bore the wounds of an insurrectionist siege, taking the oath of office at a time when the nation faced its greatest array of crises in nearly a century.
“It does not surprise me that despite progress on Covid, despite progress on the economy, voters are not going to give us a passing grade yet,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain said in an interview. “But President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.”In his first six months, he successfully steered a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill to passage, surging funds to American families, schools and businesses battered by the pandemic.
The administration tried to pitch each development as a testament of their mettle—they’d ended the nation’s longest war and were confronting the virus. But for a president that had made competency central to his message to the American public, the pair of missteps was politically damaging. His poll numbers have yet to recover.
Winning the White House on his third try, Biden took the helm of a nation worn down by the pandemic, which had claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives and reshaped the norms of everyday life. Trump’s combative term ended with a refusal to accept the results of the election, his torrent of lies igniting a deadly riot at the nation’s Capitol.
But the legislative process has been marked by intense Democratic infighting and the failure to move the rest of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Increasingly, the president’s ambition felt more like an overreach, out of step with the Democrats’ slim margins in Congress. Biden made repeated, personal attempts to move the Senate’s two centrist Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema . There were some breakthroughs.
For as shaky as the end of Year One was, the White House sees reasons for optimism as Biden begins his second in office. Though voting rights legislation seems stalled, the Build Back Better spending agenda could be revived, albeit a scaled back version. There are signs that the Omicron variant, less deadly than Delta, has peaked in parts of the country it first hit. And some economists believe that inflation will ease before voters head to the polls for November’s midterm elections.
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