Has Biden Lost His Way? Spectre Of Carter's One-Term Presidency Haunts White House

At an Independence Day barbecue, crises swirling around him, Joe Biden declared that he had “never been more optimistic about America than I am today”.

- Lauren Gambino

Of course there were challenges, grave ones, the US president told the military families assembled on the south lawn of the White House. And the nation had a troubling history of taking “giant steps forward” and then a “few steps backwards”, he acknowledged.

But Biden gave a hopeful speech that reflected his often unshakeable faith in the American experiment on the 246th anniversary of its founding . Yet, many Americans, even his own supporters, no longer share the president’s confidence.

To many observers Biden appears to be at a moment of profound crisis in his presidency: and one he is struggling to address. The spectre of Jimmy Carter – a one-term Democrat whose failure to win the 1980 election ushered in the Ronald Reagan era – is starting to haunt the Biden White House.

With decades-high inflation, near-weekly mass shootings, a drumbeat of alarming disclosures about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his election defeat and successive supreme court rulings that shifted the country’s political landscape sharply rightward, Biden’s upbeat speech struck even his fellow Democrats as ill-suited for what they view as a moment of existential peril for the country.

A new Monmouth poll captured the depth of America’s pessimism: at present just 10% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, compared with 88% who say it is on the wrong track. Confidence in the country’s institutions fell to record lows this year, according to the latest Gallup survey . The presidency and the supreme court suffered the most precipitous declines, while Congress drew the lowest levels of confidence of any institution at just 7%.