The Memo: Biden faces choppier waters

President Biden is enjoying strong approval ratings but faces a troubling stretch ahead as he approaches his four-month mark in office.

Inflation ticked up rapidly in April. Job numbers disappointed. Israel and the Palestinians are in a de facto state of war. And, as if all that were not enough, other issues including immigration and the culture war are simmering.

None of that means Biden or his supporters need to panic. He is scoring poll ratings that his predecessor, former President Trump, would envy. In a recent poll from Associated Press-NORC, Biden got a 63 percent approval rating. Trump never rose above 50 percent in the major polling averages.

But the question now is whether Biden can sustain his strong start as other challenges press in.

The last week, for example, has been characterized by confusion over a notably abrupt change in guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over mask-wearing.

The president has been judged particularly favorably for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic up to now. A National Public Radio-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll released Monday saw him winning the approval of 67 percent of registered voters on the topic, while just 30 percent disapproved.

But the political danger for Biden is that a rapid national recovery from the trauma of the pandemic is now priced into his poll ratings. Any unexpected hiccup could set him back.

The same goes for the economy. 

Republicans have been hammering Biden after job numbers came in way below projections earlier this month. Economists had been expecting around 1 million jobs would have been created in April. The official tally was about one-quarter of that. 

The GOP argument is simple: The tepid growth is rooted in Democrats’ expansion of unemployment benefits which, they say, discourages people from returning to work.

“It’s a throwback to the liberalism of the 1970s and ’80s, where you had benefits that incentivized people not to work,” said Matt Gorman, a GOP strategist and former communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. 

The specter of inflation is once again rising, with the consumer price index shooting up 4.2 percent in April, the fastest rate of growth since 2008.

The argument against Biden and the Democrats here is that the spending already enacted in the COVID-19 relief bill risks overheating the economy. Further largesse aimed at both traditional infrastructure and social infrastructure will worsen the problem, critics say.

That case is made primarily by conservatives, though former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who served under former Presidents Clinton and Obama, has also joined the bearish chorus — much to the annoyance of critics on his left.

Biden’s defenders, as well as pivotal independent figures such as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, argue that the spike in inflation is transitory — a natural byproduct of the nation’s recovery from the COVID-19 slump. 

Conservatives aren’t convinced.

Referring both to the inflation figures and the job numbers, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker wrote on Monday that “it’s hard to recall a week of official data that more directly challenged the entire governing premise of a fledgling administration than what arrived in early May.”

Biden, Baker argued, was facing a reckoning for ignoring “the immutability of certain economic truths.”

Democrats dismiss both that critique and the more generalized fears that Biden is facing trouble ahead. 

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy are in good shape, even if they are not so stellar as his standing on COVID-19. The NPR poll showed his economic performance winning a thumbs-up from 51 percent of registered voters, against 44 percent who disapproved.

Democratic strategist Tad Devine said that it was unwise to extrapolate from a single month’s job figures — such data is notoriously volatile — and emphasized that the economy is “poised to grow at a very healthy clip.”

Referring to the various looming challenges, he said: “Look, these are real events and they are issues that have to be dealt with, but I don’t see them as some kind of downfall for him at all. Presidents get judged by doing tough things. He took on a very tough thing — the pandemic — and he is making tremendous progress there, and on the economy.”

Biden is, for now, also helped by disarray in the Republican Party. 

The GOP has decided to align fully behind Trump, last week jettisoning his leading critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), from her House leadership role. The internal squabbles have consumed much of the party’s oxygen, leaving it less effective in either attacking Biden or in proposing meaningful policies of its own.

“The biggest problem is that the Republican Party has not set forth any programs of significance yet,” said Susan Del Percio, a GOP strategist and Trump critic. “Put forward what you want!”

Even so, other Republicans argue that Biden is misreading the public mood and that blowback is coming.

Gorman argued that the big picture is one in which “Biden’s biggest vulnerability is that he is getting pulled to the left by a Democratic Party far more to the left than he is.”

He argued this pattern was seen across a range of issues from infrastructure, taxation and spending to the Middle East.

It’s easy to exaggerate Biden’s difficulties. 

For now, he remains in good shape. But he will need to be nimble if he is to avoid the potholes in the road ahead.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage