Biden has succeeded at not being Trump

If President Biden is looking for a ray of light in this darkest of his political winters, he should take comfort in this: The collective media have universally declared him dead. The cock has crowed, the fat lady has sung, turn out the lights, the party’s oh-vah.

The good news for the president is that we’re almost always wrong.

Look at recent history. Talking heads who once said Biden needed to be bold are now saying that he overreached. Those who wanted him to forget the opposition and go for the whole enchilada now say he should have been more bipartisan in his approach. He either has been too conciliatory to Joe Manchin or he needs to work more closely with Joe Manchin, take your pick. The president isn’t making himself available to the press; the press conference went on too long.

But we know the pattern: The fact-based media will tear someone to shreds until, looking for a new angle, momentum builds for a comeback story.

Already there is material to be worked with, now and in the future. If it’s true that we elected Joe Biden because he was not Donald Trump, here are some of his accomplishments in office so far:

He has not raped public lands. He has not separated children from their parents. He has not funneled taxpayer money into his own private properties. He has not tried to undermine the U.S. census. He has not lied about the weather. He has not tried to strip millions of Americans of health care. He has not tried to overthrow election results.

Further, if you’re a Biden fan, here’s the good news: His uneven results are coming in his first year in office, not his fourth. And some of the bad news, with distance, doesn’t look all that bad. Getting us out of Afghanistan was a win, even if it didn’t go as smoothly as a shopping trip to Target.

Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter, seem snakebit from the beginning and never recover. Some, like Bill Clinton, who in his early days in office became mired in a gays-in-the-military quagmire, stumble out of the gate but sprint down the stretch.

Politically handicapping is so hard because events make the president more than the president makes events. Carter’s chance at reelection was torpedoed by the Iranian hostage crisis; Donald Trump’s by COVID.

Handicapping a politician’s chances also requires inspection of the opposition. Clinton was blessed with Newt Gingrich, whom he outfoxed at every turn. Carter, by contrast, ran headlong into a generational candidate in Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump continues to be the Democrats’ best weapon, and they should be concerned over signs in his own party of Trump fatigue. Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies are not the worry; the worry is that Republicans nominate someone who, like Trump, believes in one-party rule, but, unlike Trump, has the ability to pull it off.

Biden, like democracy itself, might look really bad at times — until you consider the alternatives.

But mainly, the hand wringers shouldn’t care so much about conditions today, they should care about conditions on Labor Day of 2024. Just to pick one example of how things will almost assuredly change, the states and the feds are sitting on an enormous pile of cash right now, due to stimulus bills and record-setting revenues produced by this supposedly terrible economy. States that were deeply in the red before the pandemic now have surpluses as far as the eye can see.

This money over the next three years will begin to show up by summer in a massive wave of programs and new construction projects. Americans like that because it feels like progress, and progress is what reelects presidents.

So before making predictions about the next presidential election, these questions must be correctly answered: Will inflation continue to be an issue, or will the spike in prices simply be a COVID-associated anomaly? Will omicron prove to be the one last gasp of COVID, or are more variants on the horizon? Will there be electric cars in every garage and solar panels on every roof, making us feel good about America’s technological advancements, or will Coal & Associates continue to hold a death grip on our energy system?

If and when Republicans take control of Congress in the midterms, will they behave, or will they create mayhem and remind everyone why they fell out of power in the first place? Do Democrats continue to whine about Republican ballot-box skullduggery, or do they roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of registering voters and meeting them in the living rooms?

And of course, what unknowable events lurk in the future that could make or break a presidency?

Answer those correctly, and I’ll tell you whether Biden wins another term. Yes, I’m that good.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Biden has succeeded in not being Trump