This September 11, a diminished president will preside over
a diminished nation.
We are a country that could not keep a demagogue from the
White House; could not stop an insurrectionist mob from storming the Capitol;
could not win (or at least avoid losing) a war against a morally and
technologically retrograde enemy; cannot conquer a disease for which there are
safe and effective vaccines; and cannot bring itself to trust the government,
the news media, the scientific establishment, the police, or any other institution
meant to operate for the common good.
اضافة اعلان
A civilization “is born stoic and dies epicurean,” wrote
historian Will Durant about the Babylonians. Our civilization was born
optimistic and enlightened, at least by the standards of the day. Now it feels
as if it’s fading into paranoid senility.
Joe Biden was supposed to be the man of the hour: A calming
presence exuding decency, moderation, and trust. As a candidate, he sold
himself as a transitional president, a fatherly figure in the mold of George
H.W. Bush who would restore dignity and prudence to the Oval Office after the
mendacity and chaos that came before. It’s why I voted for him, as did so many
others who once tipped red.
Instead, Biden has become the emblem of the hour: Headstrong
but shaky, ambitious but inept. He seems to be the last person in America to
realize that, whatever the theoretical merits of the decision to withdraw our
remaining troops from Afghanistan, the military and intelligence assumptions on
which it was built were deeply flawed, the manner in which it was executed was
a national humiliation and a moral betrayal, and the timing was catastrophic.
We find ourselves commemorating the first great jihadi
victory over America, in 2001, right after delivering the second great jihadi
victory over America, in 2021. The September 11 memorial at the World Trade
Center — water cascading into one void, and then trickling, out of sight, into
another — has never felt more fitting.
Now Biden proposes to follow this up with his $3.5 trillion
budget reconciliation bill, which The Times’ Jonathan Weisman describes as “the
most significant expansion of the nation’s safety net since the war on poverty
in the 1960s.”
When Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty, its
associated legislation — from food stamps to Medicare — passed with bipartisan
majorities in a lopsidedly Democratic Congress. Biden has similar ambitions
without the same political means. This is not going to turn out well.
Last week, Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West
Virginia, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which he said, “I,
for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of
additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to
ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government
programs.”
Is the White House paying any more attention to Manchin’s
message than it did to classified intelligence briefs over the summer warning
of the prospect of a swift Taliban victory?
Maybe Biden supposes that the legislation, if passed, will
prove increasingly popular over time, like Obamacare. That’s the optimistic
scenario. Alternatively, he could suffer a legislative calamity like Hillary
Clinton’s health care reform in 1994, which would have ended Bill Clinton’s
presidency save for his sharp swing to the center, including ending “welfare as
we know it” two years later.
Even the Obamacare/optimistic precedent was followed by a
Democratic rout in 2010, when the party lost 63 House seats. If history repeats
itself at the 2022 midterms, I doubt that even Joe Biden’s closest aides think
he has the stamina to fight his way back in 2024. Has Kamala Harris shown the
political talent to pick up the pieces?
Perhaps what will save the Democrats is that Biden’s
weakness will tempt Donald Trump to seek (and almost certainly gain) the
Republican nomination. But then there’s the chance he’d win the election.
There’s a way back from this cliff’s edge. It begins with
Biden finding a way to acknowledge publicly the gravity of his administration’s
blunders. The most shameful aspect of the Afghanistan withdrawal was the
incompetence of the State Department when it came to expediting visas for
thousands of people eligible to come to the United States. Accountability could
start with Antony Blinken’s resignation.
The president might also seize the “strategic pause” Manchin
has proposed and push House Democrats to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan
infrastructure bill without holding it hostage to the $3.5 trillion
reconciliation bill. Infrastructure is far more popular with middle-of-the-road
voters than the Great Society reprise that was never supposed to be a part of
the Biden brand.
My sense is that Biden will do neither. The last few months
have told us something worrying about this president: He’s proud, inflexible,
and thinks he’s much smarter than he really is. That’s bad news for the
administration. It’s worse news for a country that desperately needs to avoid
another failed presidency.
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