Joe Biden has now been president for nearly 100 days. It seems longer than that.
One hundred days is an easy milestone, and it gives us a glimpse of how any new president is doing.
Our friends in the big newsrooms are all saying that Biden is doing great. A new poll yesterday gave Biden a 54% approval rating. That is better than President Trump, the big newsrooms all said. What they didn’t say is that Biden’s approval rating is lower than all other recent presidents besides Trump.
Half the country doesn’t like what Biden is doing to this country. The other half kinda tolerates him.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson tried to paint Biden’s first 100 days as a roaring success. He came up with two things.
The increasingly radical presidency of Joe Biden was built on a straightforward foundation: putting Covid-19 shots in arms and stimulus checks in the bank.
"When I took office, I decided that -- it was a fairly basic, simple proposition, and that is I got elected to solve problems," Biden said at his first official news conference in March. "And the most urgent problem facing the American people, I stated from the outset, was Covid-19 and the economic dislocation for millions and millions of Americans."
Had Biden stumbled on these key tasks, his emerging, and staggering, multi-trillion dollar aspirations to remake the US economy and much of the social safety net would have appeared not just ambitious but politically inconceivable.
But the President can report at the end of his first 100 days in office to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night that he has successfully embarked on a mission he defined on Inauguration Day to "repair," "restore," "heal" and "build."
He promised 100 million vaccines administered in his first 100 days, and delivered 200 million. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, he sent out the $1,400 emergency checks that never arrived under ex-President Donald Trump and a Republican Senate.
Checks in hands, shots in arms, fewer people getting sick. That is the headline from Biden’s first 100 days.
None of that is his doing, by the way.
Nancy Pelosi played games to keep President Trump from getting credit for the stimulus checks. President Trump set the groundwork for the vaccines to be created and used. And Joe Biden didn’t stop anyone from getting the virus, a year of mitigation and vaccinations would have done that no matter who was in the White House.
Liz Peek over at Fox News had a more fleshed-out look at the president’s first three-months-plus in office.
In just three months, under Biden’s presumed leadership, Democrats have threatened to pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the filibuster, abolish the Electoral College, grant statehood to Washington, D.C., federalize voting laws, and enact a labor bill that would overturn right-to-work statutes in 27 states.
Democrats want unlimited power and are mobilizing all possible means to get it.
The question for every election is ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ One hundred days in office, can you say you are better off under Joe Biden? Is this country better off?
Are there as many good paying jobs? Is gas cheaper? Do we have better relationships with people who are not the same color? Do we have better relationships with people who don’t share our politics? Do we have better relationships with other countries, including China and Russia? Are our cities safer? Are our schools better? Do you feel better? More free? Any happier?
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