The Patron Saint of Stuck Presidencies

What Joe Biden can learn from Harry Truman

- By John Dickerson. Illustration by Robert Dünweller

The Biden administration has already zipped through two familiar stages of the modern presidency. First came the high expectations: Dreamy headlines compared Joe Biden to Franklin D. Roosevelt, an unrealistic standard for a president with the thinnest possible margin in the Senate and just a four-vote majority in the House. Then reality intruded—COVID-19 didn't go away, inflation and the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even messier than expected. Biden's plans for social spending and voting reform were blocked by senators in his own party. This initiated the All is not lost. As a headline on a New York Times, op-ed by the senior Obama adviser David Axelrod declared, “It's Not Over for Joe Biden.”

The president's approval rating these days fibrillates just above 40 percent. Historically, when that number has been less than 50, the president's party has lost an average of 37 House seats in the midterms. The next stage in the Biden presidency's journey will undoubtedly be lighting a candle at the shrine of Harry Truman, the patron saint of presidencies stuck in the mud. Truman, the 33rd president and the subject of Jeffrey Frank's The Trials of Harry S.