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Joe Biden promised voters they wouldn’t have to keep thinking about politics all the time. That hasn’t worked out for them, or him.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Plus: Scroll down to read Imani Perry’s picks from the newly launched Atlantic archive.
Hardly Reassuring
Political strategists and pundits sometimes talk about the quest to win the news cycle. These days, the question is less whether Joe Biden will win a news cycle than what kind of defeat he’ll suffer. The president’s struggles stem from a range of causes—inflation, foreign war, the lingering effects of COVID, a conservative judiciary, and sloppy messaging—but one way I’ve been thinking about them is this: Biden hasn’t managed to deliver the boring America he promised when he ran for president.
Biden’s pitch in 2020 was that he would bring a return to normalcy. To him, Donald Trump’s presidency was an aberration, a view that set him apart from his Democratic rivals who saw Trump as the culmination of long-running currents in American society and Republican politics. But for an electorate exhausted by the roller coaster of the Trump years and then COVID, Biden’s reassurance that politics could be boring again was pretty appealing.
As hard as it can be to be interesting, delivering dull is even harder. Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly quipped that the most challenging part of his job was “events.” Biden can surely sympathize. Last month’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade stripped Americans of what many consider a basic right. It is also, for the White House, a political migraine. The decision was the product of a Court stocked with conservative justices before Biden was elected. The White House couldn’t prevent the ruling, nor does the president have many (if any) good options to push back.
And yet Biden seems to have made the worst of a bad situation. His top lawyer was somehow taken by surprise by the timing of the decision, according to CNN—a claim that might seem difficult to believe if it weren’t for the lack of any unified response from the White House. The administration seems entirely reactive, announcing, for example, that declaring a health emergency is not a “great option,” before suddenly reconsidering it.
Over the weekend, Biden’s departing communications director slammed “activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” a peculiar place to train her fire. Maybe she’s trying to recapture the magic of the 2020 campaign, when Biden was at odds with progressive “Defund the police” activists but in step with voters. In this case, however, voter sentiment is clearly in favor of some access to abortion, and not just among Democrats.
This shiftlessness has taken a toll. As Ed Kilgore writes for Intelligencer, Biden is now polling lower than Trump was at the same point in his presidency. The New York Times seems to run a big step-back story about Biden being old on roughly a monthly basis. Today brought a poll finding that almost two-thirds of Democratic voterswould like to see someone else as the party’s nominee in 2024.
Perhaps this negative reaction to Biden is unfair. Even with narrow control of Congress, Democrats have passed blockbuster legislation, such as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and a major COVID relief package, though they made the mistake of promising a Build Back Better plan that they have been unable to pass. Experts have widely praised Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last week’s unemployment report beat expectations. Gas prices are falling. Some of the other problems, including inflation and COVID, are largely out of his control.
That’s not what voters want to hear, though. They voted for Biden because he offered reassurance, and now he’s flailing because he … can’t offer reassurance. Writing in this newsletter almost a month ago, my colleague Tom Nichols pleaded for voters to leave Joe Biden alone. The problem is that they want to be left alone, too, without having to worry about the cost of filling up their tank or whether they’ll be able to get basic health care if they’re pregnant. And yet politics, or reality, keeps barging in.
Related:
Today’s News
After defying a congressional subpoena, Steve Bannon claimed that he is now willing to testify before the House January 6 committee.
The death toll from Russia’s Saturday strike on a Ukrainian apartment block in the Donetsk town of Chasiv Yar rose to 31.
When I was a teenager living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I often walked by the home of the abolitionist and Union officer Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I remembered that Ida B. Wells may have visited Higginson there, and romantically imagined myself in her footsteps, walking up Buckingham Street. So it has been particularly exciting to find Higginson’s abolitionist writings in the Atlantic archive.
In this essay from the June 1861 issue, he recounts the insurrection led by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina about 40 years prior. He isn’t as brutally honest about racism as Wells, but Higginson’s recognition of the nobility of self-emancipation is meaningful, especially at the dawn of the Civil War.
Two other writings from the archive that aroused my interest both come from the September 1859 issue. The first is a description of a trio’s visit to Martha’s Vineyard, long before the island became associated with the elite resort glamour that characterizes it today. The displacement of the Gay Head tribe, the whaling industry’s impact on the island’s ecology, and the local language and culture of New England are rendered vividly. If you are familiar with the landscape, the description of the Vineyard’s geography and beauty will be wholly familiar. But this story tells something about the root of the place and how it became the treasured enclave it is today.
The other article from that issue is another account set in what is now a popular tourist destination: Savannah, Georgia. Specifically, it is a laudatory review of a pamphlet by the American Anti-Slavery Society about an event known historically as “the weeping time,” the largest slave auction in United States history. As the pamphlet reveals, it was a Philadelphian who held the auction—a potent reminder that although antebellum slavery was centered in the South, its beneficiaries were elites all over the country.
Finally, this 1954 article, published two months after the Brown v. Boardof Education decision, gives a potent, if brief, history of school segregation. But what strikes me about it is the author Arthur E. Sutherland’s hopefulness regarding desegregation—a hope that was soon dashed by massive resistance and the anemic “all deliberate speed” mandate of the second Brown opinion. Now, of course, though Brown doesn’t appear to be immediately under threat, the ideology of white supremacy that undergirded legal segregation is on the rise. Nearly 60 years later, hope feels harder to come by.
— Imani Perry
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
(The Atlantic)
Read. “Lucky,” a new poem by Carl Dennis: “No way to explain to a car, which always waits / Just where you leave it, the human capacity / To drift in thought away from the body / Just when the body is in need of guidance.”
Watch. Already seen Top Gun and in the mood for more explosive action? Watch DéjàVu (available on Disney+ and to rent on Amazon Prime),a 2006 Tony Scott–directed thriller with Denzel Washington that turns into a “sort of high-tech Vertigo.”
Or try something else from our writer’s list of 26 brilliant movies that critics were wrong about.
Drink. It’s Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven. What the hell is a slushie, anyway? Find out here.
It’s a pleasure to be filling in here this week, especially because it gives me a chance to celebrate the hottest team in baseball. I routinely search for consolation in Tom Scocca’s paean to the 2011 Baltimore Orioles, who finished last in the AL East but spoiled the playoff hopes of the hated Red Sox on the final day of the season. Scocca notes how small (even petty) victories can make rooting for a bad team feel worthwhile. The O’s will almost certainly finish in the basement again this year, but they’ve just won eight games in a row, and they’re guaranteed not to lose tonight, because it’s an off day. Here’s to small victories—or even better, eight of them.
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the NDP is caving to political pressure from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when it comes to their stance on the consumer carbon price.
Trudeau says he believes Jagmeet Singh and the NDP care about the environment, but it’s “increasingly obvious” that they have “no idea” what to do about climate change.
On Thursday, Singh said the NDP is working on a plan that wouldn’t put the burden of fighting climate change on the backs of workers, but wouldn’t say if that plan would include a consumer carbon price.
Singh’s noncommittal position comes as the NDP tries to frame itself as a credible alternative to the Conservatives in the next federal election.
Poilievre responded to that by releasing a video, pointing out that the NDP has voted time and again in favour of the Liberals’ carbon price.
British Columbia Premier David Eby also changed his tune on Thursday, promising that a re-elected NDP government would scrap the long-standing carbon tax and shift the burden to “big polluters,” if the federal government dropped its requirements.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister responsible for consumer protection, has tabled a bill to force merchants to calculate tips based on the price before tax.
That means on a restaurant bill of $100, suggested tips would be calculated based on $100, not on $114.98 after provincial and federal sales taxes are added.
The bill would also increase the rebate offered to consumers when the price of an item at the cash register is higher than the shelf price, to $15 from $10.
And it would force grocery stores offering a discounted price for several items to clearly list the unit price as well.
Businesses would also have to indicate whether taxes will be added to the price of food products.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Quebec legislature member Youri Chassin has announced he’s leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec government to sit as an Independent.
He announced the decision shortly after writing an open letter criticizing Premier François Legault’s government for abandoning its principles of smaller government.
In the letter published in Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, Chassin accused the party of falling back on what he called the old formula of throwing money at problems instead of looking to do things differently.
Chassin says public services are more fragile than ever, despite rising spending that pushed the province to a record $11-billion deficit projected in the last budget.
He is the second CAQ member to leave the party in a little more than one week, after economy and energy minister Pierre Fitzgibbon announced Sept. 4 he would leave because he lost motivation to do his job.
Chassin says he has no intention of joining another party and will instead sit as an Independent until the end of his term.
He has represented the Saint-Jérôme riding since the CAQ rose to power in 2018, but has not served in cabinet.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
