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As President Joe Biden’s administration marks the one-year anniversary of his inauguration this week, analysts are assessing where his administration has succeeded and failed so far in his time in office.
“Biden’s problems start with two big ones: the pandemic and inflation,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “In both cases, he has incorrectly believed that they were improving, while objectively they were not.”
“His administration got inflation completely wrong, and a good deal about the pandemic wrong too. No one can be faulted for projecting variants inaccurately, but Biden’s experts simply were not prepared for what seems like probable eventualities — the need for more testing instruments, and the like,” Sabato told MarketWatch in an email.
In addition, the Biden administration had a “disaster” with its withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, according to Sabato. The University of Virginia expert said the chaotic exit probably was not “permanently damaging” for Biden politically, but it “ruined what otherwise would have been a very popular move to end a two-decade war,” as “inadequate planning for contingencies was obvious.”
Matthew Continetti, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, picked the same three topics as Sabato when asked what the 46th president is getting wrong.
“On inflation, Afghanistan and the pandemic, I think he’s failed, and this is responsible for his political dilemma,” Continetti said. Some 52% of Americans don’t approve of Biden’s performance, while 42% do, according to a RealClearPolitics average of job-approval polls.
Pandemic strategy has been one of Biden’s strengths, but he “didn’t quite anticipate” how the coronavirus would change with its delta and omicron variants, and he didn’t account for the number of Americans who are “not going to listen to the government and rebel at the idea of vaccine mandates,” Continetti said.
Read more: Omicron cases seem to have peaked in northeastern states, but hospitals are slammed
Also: Inflation rate hits nearly 40-year high of 7%
Henrietta Treyz, director of economic policy at Veda Partners, said messaging is the No. 1 thing that the Biden administration needs to work on. Some 51% of Americans think the U.S. economy is getting worse, even as the unemployment rate has dropped and the economy keeps growing, she said.
The message about economic improvements “just doesn’t come across when omicron variants, inflation fears, travel disruptions and school closures continue to wreak havoc on the everyday lives of average Americans,” Treyz told MarketWatch. “Getting a consistent macro message out about the coming months of COVID is something the administration could do better.”
After noting the upcoming one-year mark, White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday touted “the biggest year of job growth in American history,” saying it was the “direct result of actions taken by President Biden and Democrats in Congress, including the American Rescue Plan, the vaccination effort it helped fund and now the bipartisan infrastructure law.” Speaking to reporters at a briefing, Psaki said the U.S. economy regained 6.4 million jobs over the past 12 months, as the unemployment rate fell to 3.9% from 6.4%.
Biden’s achievements
Both Veda’s Treyz and AEI’s Continetti said March’s COVID relief package and November’s infrastructure law rank as top accomplishments for Biden.
With those two measures, he pumped almost $3.5 trillion into the economy, Treyz said, helping to “pull the U.S. out of the COVID recession and emerge with a more powerful and rejuvenated infrastructure grid.”
Continetti said he didn’t think the aid package was necessary, but it was an achievement, while the bipartisan infrastructure
PAVE,
measure was “an example of exactly what a lot of voters thought Biden would spend all of his presidency doing — which is cut deals with Republicans on non-controversial things like roads and bridges.”
“It took him a while to get there because, of course, he was pairing it for a long time with the much more ambitious Build Back Better plan, which went nowhere,” the AEI senior fellow said, referring to the political maneuvering around the infrastructure law.
Sabato said a main thing that Biden’s gotten right is he’s “not Donald Trump.”
“By and large he’s logical. He rarely insults people or other countries,” Sabato said. “He’s not exciting and that’s exactly what the country wanted after four years of heart attack-inducing excitement.”
Assessing the stock market’s advance
What should investors make of the S&P 500’s
SPX,
advance of around 21% over the past 12 months?
That gain “has to be balanced against inflation, and what consumers are feeling, and I’m not sure the market has exactly priced in the extent and the duration of the inflation,” said Continetti, who pointed as well at what’s expected this year from the Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell.
“Also, of course, we’ve yet to see Powell act on his pledge to begin the rate increases and to dial back the quantitative easing from the pandemic,” he said.
Treyz said the “picture the market is painting” has to do with “opportunity, rebound and growth in a relatively unique recession-rebound environment where instead of man-made inflation events like the 1970s, this is one of highly complicated but predictable supply disruptions globally that will take time to unwind.”
“I would say that the steep decline and rapid return of the stock market throughout the pandemic is becoming more unpredictable and volatility lies ahead,” she added. “There’s opportunity in volatility and most investors are looking forward to breaking out the big guns to navigate the next [one to three] years.”
What’s ahead
Republicans are widely expected to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in this November’s midterm elections, and the GOP is getting good odds for taking back the U.S. Senate, too. Having his Democratic Party lose its grip on both chambers of Congress could leave Biden focused on foreign policy rather than domestic goals.
“We are optimistic and relatively out of consensus in expecting one more ~$700B-$1T spending package out of Washington in the next few months, but after that it will be foreign policy and China all the time,” Treyz said.
The University of Virginia’s Sabato said the “most shocking thing about Biden’s first year is that 71% of the Republican Party believes he isn’t a legitimate president — which is completely and totally wrong.”
“The American Republic cannot survive if this continues since the rot will extend to 2024 and beyond. This is as important a matter as the pandemic, and more important than inflation and some of the other troubles the country faces,” he said.
