It wasn’t long ago that the media had created a narrative that would persist throughout the 2020 presidential campaign. To save the country from four more years of incompetence and chaos, the country needed to elect Joe Biden.
“America has a stark example of competence vs. incompetence before its eyes,” wrote Forbes contributor Will Jeakle back in October, in an article praising Biden as the competent option.
“Biden was not our first choice for the Democratic nomination,” wrote the Bangor Daily News shortly before the election. “But, he will bring much-needed competency and compassion to the White House.”
“Biden will be able to compassionately and competently deal with the challenges facing the US,” Michael Gordon from Business Insider wrote last summer.
“With lives and livelihoods at stake, our nation needs a leader with the experience, competence and character of Joe Biden,” said former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush and former assistant secretary of Health and Human Services Suzy DeFrancis.
And so on.
Related: Bill Maher, Sam Harris Claim Biden’s Afghanistan Mess Is ‘Trumpian’
But if the past few months have proven anything, it’s that Biden’s experience didn’t bring competence along with it.
“For most of the last week, in the fires of the worst foreign policy crisis of his young administration, the president who won the White House on a promise of competence and compassion has had trouble demonstrating much of either,” wrote Peter Baker of the New York Times.
Former Obama advisor David Axelrod said Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal “cuts against some of his core perceived strengths: competence, mastery of foreign policy, supreme empathy. It’s as if his eagerness to end the war overran the planning and execution.”
Joe Biden is “facing a crisis of competence,” wrote Chris Cillizza last week, pointing out that Biden’s argument on the campaign trail was “that the country badly needed a steady hand on the tiller — someone who had been there and done that. Someone who didn’t need training to do the job. Someone who was exactly the opposite of the guy currently in office.”
“While the crisis in Afghanistan is front and center in this reexamining of Biden’s competence argument, it’s far from the only data point in that conversation,” he continued, citing the resurgence of COVID and the border crisis as other examples.
Make no mistake about it, those are strong words for someone who is often a shill for the Democrats. He’s not alone, either. Others in the left-wing media have found it difficult to spin the Afghanistan situation positively and are calling out Biden for his incompetence. But it gets worse than that for Joe Biden, as most Americans no longer see him as competent.
A CBS News/YouGov poll finds that Americans no longer believe Biden to be competent, focused, or effective as president. pic.twitter.com/bUa5hcxWWd
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) August 23, 2021
If most Americans no longer see Biden as competent, then the entire point of Biden being president is gone. For months, we were told that Trump was the epitome of incompetence, and Joe Biden, with decades of experience, was the polar opposite. He was the man whose experience would “build back better” or something like that. Unfortunately, even when it came to COVID, the Biden administration has been plagued with mixed messages and a stalled vaccination effort thanks to the disastrous decision to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over a one-in-a-million risk of severe blood clotting.
In less than a year, Joe Biden proved his presidency to be utterly pointless. Experience, he may have, but the quality of the experience has not given him the competence America was promised. Should Biden run for reelection in 2024, and if his challenger ends up being Donald Trump, what’s his pitch going to be? He can’t run on competence or experience anymore. He has to own the mistakes he’s made, which have undoubtedly proven that the competent president left office on January 20.
