Biden only has self to blame for bad polls
President Joe Biden is reportedly quite bothered by his low approval ratings and polls showing him lagging former President Donald Trump, according to the Washington Post. While he demanded answers from his team, the president needs to look in the mirror and take responsibility for his failures and overreaches.
The Joe Biden who campaigned for president of the United States is quite different from the one Americans ultimately got in the White House.
Biden’s opening message to the American people as a candidate for president made clear he was running for president in order to restore normalcy.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” he said in a campaign video invoking the violence in Charlottesville. “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are — and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
And so, after years of tumult under Trump, the American people voted clearly and decisively to elect Biden president of the United States.
But it didn’t take long for Biden to quickly take his mandate to restore normalcy and distort it into a mandate to remake America.
Soon after he was elected, Biden met with historians who encouraged him to take inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson. And so he tried, with massive spending packages that poured limitless fuel on inflation, which has eroded the wealth of Americans and made life a lot harder for lower-income and middle-class Americans.
Beyond spending, Biden has also largely kept in place Trump’s anti-trade policies, namely, tariffs. According to the Tax Foundation, “We estimate the tariffs still in effect will reduce long-run GDP by 0.21 percent, wages by 0.14 percent, and employment by 166,000 full-time equivalent jobs.” The costs of such policies add up and make life harder for ordinary Americans.
And Biden has prioritized what is in the best interest of Big Labor over the best interest of workers, with proposed crackdowns on independent contracting and the imposition of costly project labor agreements on federal construction projects.
The Biden administration has tried to spin “Bidenomics” as a win for the American people, but few Americans have fallen for such claims. According to newly released polling from Monmouth University, 68% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s approach to inflation and only 42% approve of his policies on jobs.
Taken together with Biden’s tendency to aggravate political polarization and the abandoning of any pretense of working across the aisle, it’s no wonder Biden’s poll numbers are where they are.
Of course, polls are polls and we’re still a far way out from the election. Rather than trying to be a progressive, transformational president, Biden should stick to a more moderate, modest approach to the office.