US President Joe Biden had about as bad a week as it is possible to have, last week, though it appears to have received limited attention on this side of the pond.
The problems stem from the fact that two of his signature pieces of legislation, a massive expansion of the US’ Government’s welfare state, and a much-desired-by-democrats reform of voting laws, were torpedoed in the US Senate. And not by Republicans, but by moderate members of his own party.
The week began with Biden heading to Georgia to advocate for the voting rights bill in a state which he won from Donald Trump by the narrowest of margins. Biden’s speech was unusually firey, and widely condemned. In it, he likened the voting rights bill to the crusade for civil rights for African Americans, and said that those who opposed it were on the side of “jim crow” – referring to notorious and racist laws enacted against Black Americans in the last century. To get the law passed, Biden needed Democrats in the US Senate to agree to modify the filibuster – a rule which says 60 Senators are needed to end debate on a topic, and move to a vote. Biden only has 50 democratic senators.
50 Senators are enough to change the rules, but the problem for him is that two of these Senators – Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – immediately, and publicly rebuffed him. Not only did they rebuff him, they did so in the days after his speech.
Meanwhile, Biden’s other big piece of legislation – the so-called “build back better” act – has been opposed by the same two Senators.
All of this leaves Biden in a precarious political position. His approval ratings are now – according to at least one poll – worse than Donald Trump’s at the same time in Trump’s Presidency.
This year will be dominated by the mid-term elections, in which Biden faces the very real prospect of losing both houses of Congress. As it is, with the failure of both of his signature proposals, and an election year looming, the President seems unlikely to be able to pass anything of significance in the whole of his four year term – and there are three years of it left.
Add to all this the continued widespread nature of the Covid Pandemic – which Biden, unwisely, promised to end – and mounting inflation, weak job numbers, and the Afghanistan humiliation, and Biden is rapidly entering the kind of deep unpopularity spiral which ultimately damaged his predecessor.
It is notable that there is one big difference: Under President Trump, bad news for the American President was regularly amongst the top stories in Ireland. Under President Biden, who has just had one of the worst weeks in living memory for an American President, such news struggles to make it into the top twenty stories in the Irish media. Why is that? Mostly, it is just sheer partisanship: Irish journalists wanted very badly for Biden to win. Once he did win, the human mind works as it does, making one a little bit less reluctant to report the failures of a person or candidate one has cheered on. And of course, Irish journalists have a broad audience who feels the same way: The story in 2020 was that the good guy beat the bad guy. Nobody wants to read that the good guy has made a haimes of it.
So what we get, in Ireland, as Biden flops, is the sudden pretence that we do not really notice. Sure isn’t it over there in a foreign country and haven’t we our own problems to focus on? Trump’s failures were an entertaining distraction. Biden’s failures would simply depress a certain class here. So, we ignore them.
Irish people might be surprised, this November, to read that Biden gets a tonking in the mid-term elections. They shouldn’t be.