The Memo: Biden’s overpromising problem

President Biden’s troubles are coalescing into one major problem — the perception that he promised more than he has delivered.

The days when left-wingers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) predicted Biden could be the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt look long gone.

Biden’s own claim, made six months ago, that the nation was on the brink of defeating the COVID-19 pandemic sounds equally anachronistic.

A University of Massachusetts Amherst/YouGov poll released Tuesday indicated that 55 percent of adults felt Biden had “fallen short of expectations” — way up from the 36 percent who felt that way in a previous UMass survey in April.

There is no sign of a corner being turned. Biden’s biggest priorities are mired in difficulty — or worse. 

His effort to enact the largest expansion of the social safety net in decades, via the Build Back Better plan, is on life support. Even if legislation passes in the end, it will be much more modest than was once envisioned.

The delta and omicron variants have put paid for now to the idea of vanquishing COVID-19. 

Even previously sympathetic commentators have begun to scrutinize the administration’s approach to testing, masking guidelines and communication strategy. On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci predicted that “just about everybody” will eventually be infected by coronavirus.

Biden is in the middle of a push to protect voting rights but many Democrats wonder if that is more about showing a willingness to fight than crafting a realistic strategy for success. 

A number of prominent voting rights activists declined to attend Biden’s big speech in Atlanta on Tuesday. The most high-profile of them all, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, cited a scheduling conflict as she stayed away.

Much of the Democratic base feels other cherished objectives, such as climate change and police reform, have also been neglected. Action on the former has been far less sweeping than activists would like, while the chances for the latter appear to have dwindled entirely.

Put it all together and it’s hardly surprising that progressives, in and out of elected office, are anguished, while the public at large has grown disenchanted with Biden.

Sanders called for a “major course correction” and accused the Democratic Party of having “turned its back on the working class” in a recent interview with The Guardian.

“Winning elections is not about looking good. It’s about being good,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) told The Hill earlier this week. “The path forward is to actually enact policies that address the pain people are feeling across the country, not pretend that pain doesn’t exist.”

Johnetta Elzie, a prominent civil rights activist, told this column that Biden’s effort on voting rights was “definitely late” and should have been granted “top priority” long before now.

Taking a wider view, Elzie characterized Biden as returning to the moderate incrementalism that marked his three decades in the Senate — the same record that made the left so wary of him during the 2020 Democratic primary process.

Elzie argued that, in the run-up to the 2020 election in particular, Biden had engaged in “some kind of performance of being more progressive than he actually is. I think we just returned to moderate Biden, and the progressive agenda is going to be completely gone by the wayside.”

Those kinds of sentiments are a big problem for the president.

The midterm elections are just 10 months away. Biden faces stiff headwinds, given that his approval ratings are mediocre and there is a strong historical trend of a new president’s party losing seats in the first midterms.

To avoid that fate — or even to keep Democratic losses to a non-catastrophic level — Biden needs to somehow swing the general public to his side and keep his base revved up.

“If Democrats come into the midterm elections with a message of ‘We tried; please vote for us so we can try again,’ they are going to lose,” said John Paul Mejia, national spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented progressive group. “They have a responsibility from now on to truly show the American majority they can deliver on those promises.”

The White House pushes back with vigor on those critiques. 

In recent weeks, key aides like White House chief of staff Ron Klain and press secretary Jen Psaki have been emphasizing Biden’s economic record, which includes the creation of more than six million jobs in his first year. 

Defenders of the administration also note that Biden’s two big legislative achievements — a COVID-19 relief bill passed last March and the infrastructure deal passed in November — are hardly petty matters. 

The first offered needed relief to millions of Americans, the latter was the most significant investment in decades, and together they total almost $3 trillion.

The problem, though, isn’t that Biden has done nothing. It’s that many of the people who voted for him wanted a lot more — and that he fed those hopes with his own words.

The danger of replicating that pattern on voting rights looks high. 

Biden endorsed a carve-out to the Senate filibuster during his Atlanta speech. He also compared the battle for legislation to epochal struggles of past generations, including the Civil War and the fight against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the chances of action appear slim, with key Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) giving no public sign they will be shifted out of their opposition to filibuster reform.

The whole landscape deepens progressive dismay.

“Biden ran as a supposed dealmaker, but so far the only thing he has done is deal away any leverage he had for his own agenda,” said Mejia.

Centrist Democrats would contend such criticisms are unfair, and premised upon the idea that Biden can somehow defy the laws of math when it comes to his razor-thin congressional majorities.

But fair or not, the creeping suspicion that Biden is falling short could have politically lethal consequences. 

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage. Additional reporting by Hanna Trudo.