The New Yorker published a piece Friday describing the Biden presidency as a 'haze of uncertainty' and a 'jumble of aspirations' that are far from what is politically possible to achieve.
'The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them,' Susan Glasser writes. 'Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible.'
Still, in the editorial entitled 'It's Too Early to Consign Biden to the Ash Heap,' Glasser says that conservatives declaring the Biden presidency 'dead' is as overstated as liberals dubbing him the second coming of FDR.
'The warning lights are undoubtedly flashing red for Biden right now.'
But, Glasser notes that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had low approval ratings early in their presidency and both went on to become popular two-term presidents.
'The failed-Presidency crowd sees this as the inevitable outcome of a leader who strayed from the promise of his campaign to oust Donald Trump—to return America to competent, sane governance—and instead embraced a politically impractical vision of a progressive utopia,' the piece continues.
'The general feeling among Democrats these days: Is it time to panic yet?'
Still, it praises Biden for his 'relentless diplomacy' as the progressive agenda that could define his presidency hangs by a thread in Congress.
Congress is soon set to vote on a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that progressives have promised to vote against if it doesn't come to them in tandem with a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. Moderate Democrats, meanwhile, have said they could never support such a high price tag for the second spending bill.
Meanwhile, Congress may be forced to shut down next week unless they pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling that Republicans have vowed to oppose.
'The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden's bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from, the New Yorker piece states.
But, to Biden's credit, Glasser writes: 'He has not, à la Trump, taken to Twitter to denounce the dissenting members of his party as 'dinos,' ... He has not fired anybody or started lining up primary challengers to his own party's members of Congress who have angered him. He has not called up MSNBC hosts in a panic for advice.'
Meanwhile, Biden is being squeezed on all sides by a pandemic he promised would be essentially over by this time and is still killing 2,000 per day, a widely-condemned withdrawal from Afghanistan and a surge of migrants at the southern border.
A slew of critical news coverage from the mainstream media and record-low approval polls are the latest evidence the United States is souring on President Joe Biden.
The New York Times published two pieces on Wednesday comparing Biden to former President Donald Trump despite the former building his administration on the promise he would be different than his controversial Republican predecessor.
The pieces cite Biden's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the ongoing border crisis, pointing out his falling back on policies and decisions even he himself maligned while Trump was in office.
An article titled 'Biden Pushes Deterrent Border Policy After Promising 'Humane' Approach,' begins by reflecting on scenes that have surfaced this week of border agents on horseback forcefully rounding up and charging at migrants trying to cross the chest-deep waters of the Rio Grande.
'The images could have come straight from former President Donald J. Trump's immigration playbook,' the news story notes.
That same day, a new Harvard/Harris poll indicated Trump, for the first time, has overtaken Biden in approval ratings for the first time since he lost the 2020 election.
Biden got some unflattering comparisons to President Trump from top media organizations this week while polls show American voters may like him less than the Republican
Biden has tried to distance himself from Trump's harsher border policies
It comes a day after the Washington Post's White House bureau chief slammed the president for shutting down questions from American reporters during the president's meeting Tuesday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The Times's border story published on Wednesday points out that the Biden administration promised a more 'humane' approach to tackle immigration, but is ramping up its use of a Trump-era COVID rule to expel asylum-seeking migrants on the spot - specifically, to clear some 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants out from an encampment under the Del Rio
