Can Joe Biden successfully reboot?
It’s possible; approaching their successful reelection campaigns, both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton also faced poor ratings. But their low ratings were not as low as Biden’s. He heads into election season with the lowest approval ratings — 41 percent — of any president going back to the 1950s, according to Gallup.
Only 46 percent of the public thought Obama was doing a good job in January 2012; by Election Day, his approval had jumped to 52 percent, and he easily beat Republican Sen. Mitt Romney.
Bill Clinton, too, was in trouble at the start of his reelection year, with job approval at only 46 percent; by November, that number had ticked up to 54 percent. Clinton was handily reelected.
What helped both presidents turn their fortunes around?
Both got thrashed in their first midterm elections; voter anger over their early policy excesses and failures pushed both Clinton and Obama to pivot to the middle and become more open to compromise. Americans like moderation, and cooperation.
But Biden does not offer that. Ironically, what is viewed as one of his biggest wins — a better-then-expected midterm election — may be his undoing. There has been no pivot and no softening of his vitriolic attacks on his likely challenger, Donald Trump, or Republicans in general.
Of course, Joe Biden has another problem. One of the public’s biggest concerns about Biden is his age and obviously “diminished faculties,” as special counsel Robert Hur described them. Some 86 percent of the public in one survey thought the president is simply too old to run again.
No amount of medical boosterism is going to make Biden younger; he cannot turn around the inevitability of aging.
That said, the Biden White House is clearly aiming for a reset, which could emerge in his State of the Union address on March 7. It is rumored that Biden will tackle the cost of groceries, by blaming food companies for prices that have soared 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. Inflation has come down substantially, but consumers today are spending more of their income on food than at any time in the past 30 years.
It is also clear that he will (and must) talk about immigration, which has emerged as a top issue for voters this year — and on which Biden earns extremely low marks.
The president will try to skirt responsibility for undoing all the measures in place under former President Trump that substantially secured the border. He will instead blame Republicans for the influx of some 6 million people crossing into the U.S. illegally under his watch — if only the GOP had passed his proposed immigration reform bill, he claims, the border problem would be solved.
Playing the blame game is unlikely to change public opinion. Moderating his progressive agenda might. The president needs to channel the successes of Clinton and Obama, and convince the country that he can work with Republicans to make our future brighter.
Bill Clinton’s early years were marked by numerous political miscues (like having wife Hillary try to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system) as well as coming out in support of the Brady gun safety bill and also a controversial “Don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to gays in the military. His liberal agenda drove down Clinton’s approval ratings early on, to a low point of 37 percent during 1993.
As a consequence, Democrats lost control of both the House (for the first time since 1952) and the Senate in the 1994 midterms.
Clinton was reelected in 1996 in part because he moved toward the middle, pressured by Republicans led by Newt Gingrich to reduce our substantial budget deficits, implement welfare reform and tackle a crime wave that had alarmed the nation.
In the months leading up to his reelection, the president signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a compromise bill hashed out with the GOP House that aimed to fulfill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.”
Of course, the economy helped. When Clinton took office in January 1993, the unemployment rate was 7.1 percent; by November 1996, unemployment had dropped to 5.4 percent. Coming out of the short-lived 1990-1991 recession, the economy grew at a healthy pace throughout Clinton’s first term and inflation remained under 4 percent.
Obama’s first term was characterized by recovery from the devastating financial crisis and also by a gigantic battle over his healthcare reform plan. Because the country was split over the effort, as well as alarmed about Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill, Democrats suffered an historic “shellacking” (as Obama described it) in the 2010 midterm elections, losing a whopping 63 House seats and six Senate seats.
In the lead-up to November, Obama saw his approval rise substantially, in part because of his effective response to Superstorm Sandy but more importantly by his move toward the middle, evident in a substantial tax bill enacted with the help of the GOP. In addition, unemployment fell from almost 10 percent in Obama’s first year in office to below 8 percent just before the election, and the country became more optimistic about the economy.
Ironically, the bad news for the Biden White House is that the economy is growing at a reasonable pace and unemployment is already low; those measures are not likely to get better in the coming months. In fact, they could get worse.
Biden might have benefitted from the promised red wave that never materialized in 2022; he could have moved toward the middle and blamed the GOP for having to temper his progressive agenda. Instead, he has yet to admit that he is responsible for the flood of people illegally crossing our open border, or even that it is a problem. Voters also blame the president for surging crime, gigantic fiscal deficits and ongoing inflation, and rightly so. The buck stops with Biden.
Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. Follow her on Twitter @lizpeek.