New Yorker’s Glasser Labels Biden Presidency ‘a Jumble of Aspirations’

Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker robustly criticized the direction of the Biden presidency in her article “It’s Too Early to Consign Joe Biden to the Ash Heap of History.”

While Glasser feels that it is still premature to categorize Biden as a failed president, she does leave a caveat to her headline in the subheading: “But it’s not too early for Democrats to start panicking.”

It certainly seems Democrats are panicking, Glasser stated. “The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them,” she wrote. “Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible.”

The administration finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Balancing a far-left agenda while simultaneously attempting to put out fires on multiple fronts — including the pandemic, the Afghanistan withdrawal, economic inflation, and the border crisis, which has raged all week in Texas — has been politically crippling the president.

“The country is averaging more than two thousand deaths per day in a pandemic that Biden promised would be all but over this summer,” wrote Glasser. “An immigration crisis, with thousands of Haitian refugees at the southern U.S. border, has liberals furious at the Administration’s Storm Trooper-esque tactics and conservatives in full Trumpian build-the-wall mode.”

Glasser highlighted France’s decision to pull its ambassador out of the United States after Biden undercut the country’s submarine deal with Australia, and suggested that Biden has a hard enough time negotiating with political allies, let alone political adversaries. “He can’t negotiate with China or the Republicans until he negotiates with his allies,” Glasser wrote. “France and the House progressives, ironically, are the obstacles of the week, not Xi Jinping and Mitch McConnell.”

The New Yorker author was also critical of far-left members of Congress in her opinion piece, suggesting they perceived Biden would bring about the second coming of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society:

As for Congress, the Democrats’ large progressive caucus has spent the past few months adoring Biden for agreeing to put forward a budget bill filled with so many of their priorities, from taxpayer-funded elder care to universal pre-K, from free community college to middle-class tax cuts—to the point that they anointed this period the second coming of the Great Society before the measure had even gone through a single committee-markup vote.

Glasser believes that Biden’s legacy as president hinges on one turn of pitch and toss revolving around his legislative agenda in Congress. “Many of those who now fear Biden’s Presidency is on the line include Democrats who support his goals but fear that he will not deliver,” wrote Glasser. “The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden’s bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from.”