Never have the demands on President Joe Biden been as great as they are now. This applies to him as a domestic leader, and to him as a foreign policy leader. Trouble is that his key constituents, the American people, are deeply dissatisfied with his leadership.
At home we believe he falls short on inflation, immigration, and addiction; on crime and punishment; on national security and the national deficit. Last week President Biden’s approval ratings stood at a miserably low 37%. Worse yet for the incumbent and his supporters – especially given the next presidential election is now just a year away – polls suggest that if it came to a contest today between him and his immediate predecessor, the latter would beat the former.
Abroad is worse. Biden got what he never bargained for. Not one war to which the United States had somehow to respond, but two. Biden was so eager to escape the burdens of international conflict that he got out of Afghanistan post haste – to his enduring political detriment. Now, with the war in Ukraine likely to continue for at least another year, and additionally a major crisis in the Middle East that every hour threatens to get worse, America’s chief executive has almost more than he can handle. As deeply informed observer, Walter Russell Mead, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The Middle East firestorm is merely one hot spot in a world spinning out of control.”
Whatever people hold against him, nearly no one who is not determinedly partisan argues that President Biden is either an idiot or corrupt. That he is either inexperienced or inexpert. That he is either crazy or extreme. While among Americans are fissures on both foreign and domestic policy, neither the man nor his message incites great anger or even antagonisms.
What, then, is the problem? Why is he receiving so little public support and why is such support as he does have so unenthusiastic? Two answers come to mind.
The first is my own, by now familiar point, which is to say that in the third decade of the 21st century followers generally diss their leaders. They tend no matter what not to like them. And they tend no matter what harshly to judge them and even to tear them down.
The second is Biden’s age. It’s also a familiar argument but one that does not quite get to the point – perhaps because people are reluctant to say precisely what they mean. It’s not per se that the president is 80 years old. Lots of Americans are 80 years old and they present well, hale and hearty, fully able to take on what life throws at them. Biden though is not among them. It’s not that he’s 80 years of age. It’s how he’s 80 years of age.
How does Joe Biden look? He looks old, old. Frail, feeble, and fragile; pale and gray; wispy and thin; tottering around, in small steps taken haltingly on what seem spindly, wobbly legs. His eyes are small slits in a curiously unlined but nevertheless wizened face.
How does Joe Biden sound? He sounds old, old. His voice is ancient – scrawny and raspy; croaky and scratchy; weak and wan. It seems to emanate not from deep down, in ringing – dare I say masculine? – tones. But rather from up top, from near the top of his throat, in sounds that are not exactly high-pitched, but lack the cadence of power and persuasion, of a leader in anything resembling full command.
How does Joe Biden speak? He speaks old, old. Never an orator, the passing years have not been kind to his capacity to communicate, to convince us that he’s a smart, strong leader who knows exactly what he’s doing when. Biden nearly never speaks extemporaneously. He does not trust himself, nor, apparently, do his aides presume he can do so without risking an awful gaffe. So, the president reads. He reads from a script in his thin, reedy voice that inevitably underplays if not even undermines his message.
However smart and sane whatever President Biden says or does, he cannot at this point in his life be fully appreciated nor even fully heard. Effective leaders must somehow, in some way, look and sound leader-like. Alas, for those among us who generally support him, no leader on the planet would benefit from presenting like the incumbent American president.