Rightly or wrongly, Biden’s presidency is viewed as a failure by most of the American public. Where did he go wrong?
Here is the list:
- His excessive spending added to, even if it was not the principal cause of, inflation;
- He didn’t do enough to control illegal immigration until it was too late;
- He didn’t use his leverage to restrain Bibi in Gaza; and
- He did an inadequate job of communicating his successes with the public, largely because of his age and poor health.
The first two items had the complete support of the left. The fourth was purely personal. The third marked a break with the left, but plenty of centrists, including me, agreed on this point. What does this mean for 2028?
If the progressive candidates portray the Biden years as a flop because his agenda was insufficiently ambitious, don’t believe them. There is a good reason why Bernie Sanders fought to keep Biden’s 2024 candidacy alive when everyone else had abandoned ship; the Democratic Party, including Biden, accepted most of the progressive agenda during the pandemic, with consequences that were both positive and negative.