I thought his job approval had bottomed out at 36 percent, but if he starts picking fights with pissed-off abortion fanatics, he may yet see the low 30s.
The common thread in last week’s political news coverage was how angry Democratic voters are at the torpid White House reaction to Dobbs. Team Biden had many months to formulate an aggressive response, beginning with the hints at last fall’s oral arguments before SCOTUS that Roe might be on the chopping block. They got another heads up when the draft of Alito’s majority opinion leaked in May. Lefties expected that when the decision finally dropped the White House would come out with guns blazing, various carefully crafted executive orders in hand to restore the protections that were now in the crosshairs of Republican state legislatures.
But despite the long lead time, the administration seemed caught off guard. Biden criticized the ruling but his initial comments seemed perfunctory. The left had just lost a titanic 50-year fight over Roe at a moment when they control the executive and legislative branches and none of their leaders seemed to have a plan for what to do next — and didn’t seem overly emotional about the development either.
Lefty disaffection explains how the last few points in Biden’s declining approval rating disappeared, I think. He lost independents long ago and never had Republicans to begin with, but his party had been sticking with him out of partisan loyalty. The end of Roe and the lethargic White House reaction seems to have jarred something loose. “Everything’s on the line right now. It’s truly existential,” one progressive activist told the Guardian. “It just doesn’t seem like he understands that.”
A president in Biden’s position is at grave risk of having the bottom fall out, so you would think his staff would be keen to make amends and heal the rift with disaffected, disappointed pro-choicers. Which is why eyebrows were raised in political media last night when this passage from WaPo’s new story on the White House’s abortion fiasco made the rounds:
To many increasingly frustrated Democrats, Biden’s slow-footed response on abortion was just the latest example of a failure to meet the moment on a wave of conservative rollbacks, from gun control to environmental protections to voting rights. Some aspects of the White House reaction have felt to some Democrats like a routine response, including stakeholder calls and the creation of a task force, to an existential crisis…
White House officials defend the urgency of Biden’s response and the actions he has taken on abortion, which they argue are in step with mainstream opinion. “The president has been showing his deep outrage as an American and executing his bold plan — which is the product of months of hard work — ever since this decision was handed down,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement Saturday.
“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party. It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign,” she said.
You can understand why Bedingfield and her boss are frustrated by the left whining at them and inclined to lash out. There’s nothing they can do to counter the Dobbs ruling, realistically. And it isn’t Joe Biden’s fault that Democrats never once in 50 years during periods when they controlled the government took a moment to pass a bill codifying Roe. The progressive grumbling about Sleepy Joe not seeming angry enough is scapegoating, nothing more.
But rule one of politics when your base is restive is not to insult them or suggest that they’re overreacting. Bedingfield broke that rule. It’s not going over well. “All this White House has for people who need abortions is empty promises and disrespect,” said one activist on Twitter, per the Daily Beast. She wasn’t alone:
Also, Biden and the Democrats have done absolutely fuck all to “deliver help to women who are in danger,” whatever that ultra-vague bullshit means. I cannot emphasize enough how badly telling pro-choice people to go fuck themselves right after Roe was overturned is going to go.
— Hayley McMahon, MSPH, CPH (@McMisoprostol) July 9, 2022
It is remarkably concerning that there are members of the Biden Administration who seem more frustrated at pro choice activists than at Republicans who systematically dismantled abortion rights.
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) July 9, 2022
My read on why the left is beating up on Biden post-Dobbs is that they’re exasperated by feeling so powerless at a moment when they control the heights of power. Biden’s first two years were supposed to be a golden moment for enacting the progressive agenda; instead they’re stuck with inflation, a Senate that won’t dump the filibuster, and the most momentous culture-war loss at the Supreme Court in decades. When things are bad in America, the president takes the blame whether he’s primarily responsible or not. Biden’s getting a noseful of that right now from his own base on abortion.
But Josh Barro makes a shrewd point that also helps to explain the scapegoating of Biden. Democrats simply haven’t reconciled themselves yet to the reality that abortion rights post-Roe will never be as robust as they were during the Roe era. Some Obama defenders on the center-left used to complain about the unrealistic demands made of him by progressives, dismissing those demands as based on a “Green Lantern theory of the presidency.” The president doesn’t have legal or strategic super powers he can activate to work magic when Congress and the Court have disappointed the left, they argued. But that’s essentially what furious pro-choicers are demanding of Biden right now.
It’s time to face reality, says Barro. Democrats will never again have the full loaf of abortion rights they had under Roe. But there are things they can do to increase the odds that they’ll get half a loaf (or even three-quarters of one).
Democrats and abortion-rights advocates are still living in a world where their objective is to “defend Roe” and therefore any policy that is less expansive than what had been covered by Roe is a “setback” for abortion rights. But there is no Roe to defend anymore, so this perspective makes no sense. And yet, it is the institutional position of the putatively pro-abortion-rights apparatus attached to the party…
I think a lot of Democrats have a sense that we’re dealing with a glitch in the system — that we’ll do some political thing that will restore the state of nature, where abortion in the first two trimesters is protected by a Supreme Court decision. But that’s wrong. We’ll be fighting for years over a new question: How much legislative protection, if any, should there be for abortion rights at the federal level?
Creating a situation where certain Republicans representing certain constituencies yield to political pressure to vote for at least some federal protection for abortion rights isn’t a problem with the strategy — it is the strategy to eventually secure a coalition to enact such a policy.
Instead of pushing doomed absolutist bills that would effectively legalize abortion up to the moment of birth, Democrats could zero in on a federal bill that would legalize the practice through the first 12 weeks. That would be politically popular, as a huge majority of Americans support abortion rights early in a pregnancy. And it would ensure that most abortions continue to enjoy legal protection, since more than 92 percent of terminations pre-Dobbs were carried out before 13 weeks’ gestation.
But Dems would rather cope by indulging their Green Lantern fantasies about Biden, at least for now, so he’s probably headed for an even worse patch in his polling. Thirty percent approval, here we come!
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