Failure to impress

US President Joe Biden’s job approval rating has fallen dramatically in two months. According to a Pew research poll only 44 per cent of adults approve of his performance while 53 per cent disapprove. This amounts to a major reversal since July when he had a 55 per cent positive rating and 43 per cent disapproval. While 75 per cent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents still approve, this figure has fallen from 88 per cent in July. Then 17 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent approved; that has fallen to 9 per cent.

Although half of respondents remain confident over his management of covid and the economy, he has lost ground on these issues due to the increase in covid infections and hospitalisations and decline in confidence over his handling of the economy.

The poll, conducted between 13-19 Sept., shows that the majority has “little or no confidence in four other areas.” These areas are personal and critical. Fewer respondents believe “he cares about people like them, and fewer describe him as standing up for his beliefs, honest, a good role model and mentally sharp.”

Biden is not the only politician who has taken a hit. The survey showed that the positive rating of Democratic members of Congress fell from 50 tp 39 per cent and the already low approval of their Republican colleagues slipped from 32 to 27 per cent.

Biden has responded to these ratings by saying that every presidency has its ups and downs. He has lost ground on his handling of the coronavirus epidemic as infections and hospitalisations have increased since early in the year and his stewardship of the economy.

Declining ratings registered by an average of recent polls shows that the fall on these issues has been more than matched by a fall of 20 per cent — from 54-34 per cent — caused by Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. US adults are not optimistic. Only 33 per cent believe the country is going in the right direction. This is down from 43 per cent since early last month, a figure last registered in 2009, and is consistent with surveys taken at about the same time during the Trump administration.

Biden entered the White House on a swell of unrealistic enthusiasm and expectation among Democratic and independent voters. He was seen as a miracle worker who would reverse Donald Trump’s most egregious and damaging domestic and foreign policies.

Biden undid Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate accords as the earth teetered on the brink of disaster and re-engaged with the World Health Organisation as the world battled the corona pandemic. He revoked Trump’s permit for an oil pipeline from Canada to the northern US which environmentalists and Native US activists have been battling for 10 years. Biden ended funding for Trump’s wall along the Mexican border and ban on entry of citizens of some majority-Muslim countries. He took these actions within his first days in office by signing a stack of 15 executive orders.

However, the effects of Trump’s 220 executive orders could not simply be reversed by a pen scrawl. On the domestic level, although Biden vowed to halt Trump’s cruel practice of separating from their parents migrant chidren who reached the US, by June, six months into his presidency, only seven of 2,127 held at US camps had been reunited with families under the new administration’s guidlines. Several thousand had, however, been returned in accordance with a court order issued during the Trump administration.

Biden has failed miserably to disrupt the flow of mainly Central and Latin American political and economic migrants to the US border and has simply relied on Mexico to act as a holding pen while asylum seekers are processed. While families wait, the Biden administration has detained thousands of unaccompanied minors who leave their parents to enter the US illegaly and become stuck in limbo.

Unlike Trump, Biden has taken a pro-active line on covid but has wobbled over masking, social distancing, and vaccination. He mandated jabs for federal employees only this month despite the fact that the US vaccination rate is only 55.9 per cent, considerably lower than the average rate in developed countries. In Britain and Italy, for example, the figure is 67 per cent, France 65 per cent, and the UAE a whopping 83.6 per cent.

On the covid issue, Biden must battle “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” with more than 100,000 infected people hospitalised and 1,000 dying daily. Twenty-one per cent of 18-29 year olds, 18 per cent of men, and 10 per cent of women say they will never accept vaccination. Forty-six per cent of Republicans and 44 per cent of white evangelical protestants say they are not vaccinated; 37 per cent of agricultural workers, 27 per cent of construction workers, 24 per cent

of food and drink workers and 22 per cent of people without a university degree will not get vaccinated.

On the subject of university degrees, it has been reported that 60 per cent of university students are women, 40 per cent men. They prefer to take up well-paying jobs in construction and as electricians and plumbers. This will, ultimately, shrink the pool of educated men.   

On the foreign policy plane, Biden has faltered seriously. He has enraged France by forging a deal to provide Australia with nuclear submarines without notifying Paris which had reached an agreement in 2016 to provide conventional submarines.

Biden has followed Trump’s policies on three key issues. Having promised to re-enter the 2015 accord for limiting Iran’s nuclear programme in exhange for lifting sanctions, Biden has procrastinated and prevaricated to the point of destroying the deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018 and and imposed brutal sanctions.

Although Biden pledged to re-engage with the Palestinians and support the two-state solution involving the establishment of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, he has reinstated some funding, totally cancelled by Trump, for the UN agency caring for Palestinian refugees and done nothing else.

     Finally, Biden simply adopted Trump’s pull-out from Afghanistan and withdrew US troops and contractors, deserting the Afghan army while it attempted to fight the Taliban. It has taken over

this strategic country and reinstated repressive and cruel policies imposed during its initial period of rule from 1996-2001. While the US public has not been concerned about the preceding three policies, the Afghanistan debacle seems to have made notably negative impression. Biden has lost considerable credibility due to the chaotic abandonment of a country where US troops fought and died for two decades.