Joe Biden has been charged with a serious four-year solution to Donald Trump's turmoil. But after being hit by the summer with a series of disasters - Covid, Afghanistan, wildfires in the West and Hurricane Ida in the East - his presidency is facing a collapse.
Democrats are well aware of what happened to both presidents of the Democratic Alliance after the first two years were not going well. In the middle of Bill Clinton's first term, in 1994, Democrats lost 54 and eight seats in the Senate, allowing for the administration of both Congress houses in the Republic for the first time in 40 years. Barack Obama's first civil war was devastating: Democrats have lost 63 seats in the House.
If Biden does not regain his footing in the next few months, many party veterans are in a state of shock, with his party's chances of holding on to its younger leaders in Congress are slim.
“There is no good news here. All of this is on his watch, ”said Paul Maslin, a senior Democratic Alliance leadership inspector who had been campaigning for President Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean. “You can argue with what he does or doesn't do, but it probably doesn't matter. If things go awry and things go awry, that will not help. ”
Democrats are already beginning to calculate the potential cost to the party by 2022. In addition to drinks next to a recent Democratic Governors Association meeting in Aspen, Colo., Party donors and staff are secretly looking at Afghanistan's damage and resurgence The test was difficult.
"When Biden was elected, it should have been, 'Oh, the old men are back in the room to take over,'" said one strategist who was in Aspen. “Obviously, we can't do anything. Any Democratic Alliance strategist who thinks this will not affect the center or affect the re-elected Biden, is clearly unaware that the f --- they are talking about. ”
Biden's alarming approval rate is particularly shocking to Democrats because the president's approval rate is closely related to the party's performance in the middle.
Biden's ratification rates, which have fallen within 40 years, stand in the way of Clinton during his presidency, and are worse than Obama's in 2009, before he described himself as "spam" in the middle of the following year. Democrats today hold a smaller majority in Congress than all those presidents had, with a limited margin of error in next year's mid-term elections. And that was before summer when nothing seemed to be going well.
On Friday, Biden was forced to respond to the release of a weak report on August activities. He then traveled to Louisiana, where he checked for storm damage. The Caldor Fire that burned the Lake Tahoe region went down over the weekend. But new fires are burning in California and on Tuesday he was visiting storm-affected areas of New York and New Jersey. Delta's diversity, meanwhile, has put the country on another Covid wave.
"This boy can't take a break," said Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former White House deputy chief of staff in Carter's administration. “It reminds us that we went back to those times, when we had Mount St. Helens, we had Third Mile Island… we had truck drivers stirring up trouble… Then we had a kidnapping problem. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. ”
Francis added: “Now you have a storm with a million weak people in Louisiana. He has wildfires in the West. You found the Delta variant in Covid. No one could criticize him for those things, but they have a way of influencing the political environment as a whole. What it does, disturbs people’s thinking, and when you’re in charge, people take it out on you, their frustration, their anger, whatever it is. ”