Sometimes the most important thing a president can do is tell the country he’s working on the problem its citizens are most worried about. And one of the worst setbacks a leader can confront is losing his advantage on the issue that had been his hole card.
For both reasons, President Joe Biden’s speech last week on the fight against the coronavirus’s omicron variant was one of the most useful he has given for some time. It got both substantive and political work done.
He explained how he is trying to get on top of the new wave of infections that threatens to steal Christmas. He reassured Americans that we could get through this bad patch without reimposing lockdowns, including school closings. And he was unusually direct about the political forces making the pandemic worse.
For months, Washington news has been dominated by the frustrating legislative struggle for the president’s Build Back Better program. The effort hit a wall last week with the savage — though not necessarily fatal — blow delivered by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. With last week’s address, Biden reminded the country he had not forgotten his most urgent task and sought to salvage his standing as a virus-slayer.
There are many theories to explain Biden’s declining approval ratings, but even a cursory look at the data suggests that he has taken his biggest hits on his stewardship of the war on COVID-19, once the foundation of his popularity.
In June, a Washington Post/ABC News survey found 62 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the pandemic while only 31 percent disapproved. By early November, his rating on the health emergency had plummeted: 47 percent approved, 49 percent disapproved. A CNBC survey this month found a similar deficit.
No single speech, nor a dozen of them, can offset the fact that the virus’s persistence and resurgence has left Americans, as Biden put it, “tired, worried and frustrated.â€
But an address chock-full of new actions taken to address omicron’s challenge — expanding coronavirus testing sites, distributing a half-billion free at-home tests, deploying more federal health resources to shore up strained hospitals, new “pop-up†vaccination facilities — tells the tired and the frustrated that, at the least, Biden is on the case.
And if the move toward free test kits comes too late for the holiday travel season and contradicts the administration’s earlier resistance to such an expansive approach, it showed a willingness to adjust policy to match inconvenient facts.
More than he has in the past, Biden directly confronted the politics that have made containing the pandemic so difficult.
He condemned cable television and social media personalities who are “making money by peddling lies and allowing misinformation that can kill their own customers and their own supporters.â€
He continued: “It’s wrong, it’s immoral, and I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now.â€
At the same time, he sought to drive a wedge through the anti-vaccine movement by praising former president Donald Trump not once but twice. Noting that Trump had “gotten his booster shot,†Biden quipped: “It may be one of the few things he and I agree on.â€
He went further, declaring that, “thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America is one of the first countries to get the vaccine.†Such olive branches might make a difference only at the margins of opinion, but that’s where battles are often won.
The administration is plainly frustrated that its successes — soaring economic growth, record job creation and its infrastructure bill — are receiving scant attention. The travails of Build Back Better have not helped, one reason Biden pointedly closed a brief news conference after his speech with the words: “Senator Manchin and I are going to get something done.â€
But it’s becoming ever clearer that a precondition for Biden’s success — in general, and on social, climate and voting rights legislation, in particular — will be a restoration of his image as a low-drama chief executive who can conquer the pandemic and allow Americans to enjoy life free of fears driven by a mysterious disease.
As he reaches out to whatever minority of Trump supporters are willing to listen, Biden might discover that taking an even more aggressive stance on the virus, including booster mandates and vaccine passports, is the best politics.
