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JULY 7, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
The Silence of the Joe
The president is missing.
I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
-from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
My colleague Ryan Cooper has an excellent piece
up today that takes a close look at the mystery of why President Biden
has been so consistently MIA during what should have been key moments in
his presidency-for instance, responding to the Court's revocation of
**Roe v. Wade**. Ryan documents Biden's reluctance to deal with a host
of issues, a reluctance that apparently has trickled down to some key
White House staffers. The issues and causes not in his wheelhouse seem
not to rate full-on attention.
But I'd go a step further. Even the issues that
**are**in his wheelhouse haven't rated a full presidential treatment,
either. Consider, for instance, what happened with his Build Back Better
program, clearly the centerpiece of his hopes and plans for his first
years as president. Biden didn't even dominate the discourse on BBB.
Joe Manchin did. And despite BBB's potential for establishing a Biden
domestic legacy that could be spoken of in the same breath as the
domestic legacies of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, Biden never
made a prime-time Oval Office case for the bill, or even for its very
popular particulars.
And that, sadly, is the emerging signature of Biden's presidency: He
simply doesn't dominate the discussion of virtually any issue, whether
it's outrageous right-wing overreach, horrific acts of violence, or
his very own agenda. Like Prufrock, he's not the protagonist in his
own play; for that matter, he doesn't even swell the progress of his
own legislation.
That's a highly anomalous position for a president to be in. At least
since Franklin Roosevelt, every president has in one way or another
steered the national discussion or at minimum had a strong and
impossible-to-miss voice in it. You almost have to go back to those
mid-19th-century presidential nobodies-Franklin Pierce? Millard
Fillmore?-to find a president who figured so little in the national
discourse, or who so ceded leadership to prominent members of Congress.
In those pre-Lincoln times, the key players in national policy were
congressmen and senators like Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Jefferson
Davis. In these current Biden times, they're Joe Manchin, Chuck
Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell. In legislative matters,
Biden staffers say, their boss prefers to "lead from behind." But in a
Senate where all 50 Democrats have to march in lockstep for anything to
be accomplished, presidential clout is an essential prerequisite for
lining them up. To a disinterested observer, leading from behind is
indistinguishable from following.
It shouldn't have been that difficult to follow an act like Trump.
Biden promised to restore normality, to return the White House to sanity
and civility. But the only thing less normal than a deranged American
president spouting off at every hour of the day is a president who
absents himself from the national discourse altogether.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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The End of Boris Johnson
Unless the wily prime minister has one last trick up his sleeve BY
DENIS MacSHANE
Laws That Create Countervailing Power
A roundtable discussion with Benjamin Sachs, Kate Andrias, Steve Kest,
and Robert Kuttner BY PROSPECT STAFF
President Biden Is Not Cutting the Mustard
Young people are abandoning him in droves because he won't fight for
their rights and freedom. BY RYAN COOPER
The January 6 Hearings
The committee has produced riveting testimony that all Americans should
be taking seriously. BY PROSPECT STAFF
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