Joseph and The Coat of Many Expectations

President Joe Biden boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Friday, January 5, 2024, en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.(Official White House Photo by Carlos Fyfe)

In covering the latest round of Biden Administration student loan forgiveness plans hand crafted to make a good headline while navigating around the Supreme Court, Zolan Kanno-Youngs expressed a recurring theme of frustration by President Biden and his supporters

New York Times:

The struggle illustrates a broader challenge facing the White House, according to interviews with Democratic officials, loan relief advocates and voters. In many ways, Mr. Biden has become a victim of the high expectations set by his initial sprawling proposals, leaving many voters disappointed over what he has failed to pass even as he has notched substantial policy wins on a number of fronts.

The president made the most ambitious investment to combat climate change in history, but polls have found that most Americans are unaware of his signature climate law. Despite a major stimulus bill and large investments in infrastructure and health, voters believe he has not accomplished much. And even many voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 are not impressed with the economy, despite falling inflation falls and unemployment near historic lows.

But Mr. Biden’s aides believe the student debt cancellation can be a way to quickly improve the lives of some Americans and help turn the tide on his low approval numbers.

Spoiler alert: the student loan debt forgiveness schemes, in all their variation, will not be a quick fix to President Biden’s poll numbers for the same reason most of the other policies, initiatives, executive orders, and proposed programs have those poll numbers right where there are.

“Oh expectation,” wrote Mary Shelley in one of her non-Frankenstein works, “what a frightful thing art thou, when kindled more by fear than hope!”

Expectations of Joe Biden is a case study in filters. First elected to the US Senate in 1972, Joe Biden has as much book on who he is, what he is, and how he goes about it as anyone in modern political history. Decades of public service, thousands of votes in the US Senate, untold hours of speeches, remarks, and comments…there is virtually nothing about Joe Biden you can’t find a clip of Joe Biden explaining to you over the years. Of course, there is a tremendous difference in Biden of the various decades as both times and the man have changed, but the core of how Joe Biden goes about the business of being Joe Biden is all there for folks to find.

But expectations change based on events. The blowhard senior US Senator is different from the jovial free-form Sheriff Joe of the Obama Administration is different than the successful-on-the-third-try presidential candidate Joe Biden. That last one is what really throws folks off in setting expectations and a bearing on who and what Joe Biden is, was, and can be. Nothing changes expectations and perceptions like becoming president.

Thus, to properly set expectations for Joe Biden and his administration, one has to first start with a proper perspective of how he became president. Every political party and candidate will call every win a mandate for this, that, and the other, but usually elections are far more complicated. The 2020 presidential election, however, was not complicated at all. The issue before the American people was perhaps the simplest general election issue in modern politics: a referendum on then-president Donald Trump.

Accountability starts with self, so let me pause here and put my own hand up that I was wrong about the 2020 primaries. My own expectations of Joe Biden were exceedingly low, and you can read my wrongness in all its glory here. It wasn’t that I was inaccurate in assessing the totality of Joe Biden’s career up to that point, all well-documented and bare for the world to examine. My mistake was running with the hope of a traditional primary campaign instead of assessing the fear and loathing of Donald Trump. I was wrong, Biden and his team were right.

I was hardly alone, of course. Biden’s 2020 campaign was all but left for dead in the horserace media coverage after Iowa and New Hampshire, until a funny thing happened in South Carolina. Democratic primary voters took a look at the state of the race and ran, not walked, to the polls to surge Joe Biden to the nomination and then a record-setting general election win.

Herein lies the key to Joe Biden expectations. Whatever “why” of Biden’s 2020 win over Trump one settles on is usually the base alloy of the perception structure folks have of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. since. If Biden won chiefly for just being “not Trump” then all the issues, quirks, and political baggage his 50 years of politics explain the measure of the man for good, bad, and indifferent. If one views Biden as the great savior who rescued the country from Trump, and thus all his previous sins are washed away for that great righteous electoral act, then expectations get artificially inflated.

The middling polling bears evidence the wider populace takes the former viewpoint while the writing of pieces like the above from the New York Times shows a cadre of news media and commentators — a cadre the Biden Administration is most likely to be monitoring — are running with the latter. That disconnect is the headwaters of the frustration Team Biden and their supporters are expressing in wondering why they are getting no credit, and the parallel implication that it all isn’t fair.

But politics in American isn’t about credit and fair. If you want credit go talk to Mastercard. Fair is an uncatchable phantom that makes anyone pursuing it look foolish for the effort, unless it is the once-a-year county variety where you ride the rides and play the games. Senator Biden, Ol’ Joe, Uncle Joe, Sheriff Joe, all were judged differently because they didn’t have the weight of expectation and the public ledger of what President Joe Biden has and hasn’t accomplished under his executive leadership. Clothing Joe Biden in expectations that don’t match the reality is just cultivating future surprises when Joe Biden turns out to be Joe Biden, emperor with the same clothes he has always had on.

But the good news for Joe Biden is he still isn’t Donald Trump, and four years later that is still his best argument to most voters. Fear is more his electoral friend than hope, as fear of more Donald Trump gets him far more votes than any hope that a Biden second term will be the bright shiny future of America. And fear will probably be enough to win round two of Biden vs Trump, as even a declining President Biden still seems within the margins acceptable to an increasingly unhinged and unrestrained Donald Trump.

If Joe Biden does win again, just keep it in perspective, and base that perspective of what is actually happening with the real-life man, not some great expectations of the great American political drama.