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In fact, he barely rates. His CNN town hall last week was a fizzle, averaging only 1.5 million viewers. Fox News easily beat it with its regular programming, and MSNBC had more viewers as well, dumping the president of the United States into third place in the cable-ratings race.

Hes underperformed in other more formal settings, too. Biden drew 27 million for his first address to a joint session of Congress, whereas Donald Trump drew 48 million.

The contrast with Trumps hour-by-hour, impossible-to-ignore cocktail of provocation and political melodrama, naturally, makes Bidens approach even more stark.

Hes the Olympic badminton competition after a WWE match; hes elevator music after a heavy metal concert; hes the sparkler after a fireworks display.

Bidens presidency is, in this sense, practically pre-modern, almost hearkening back to the pre-mass media days when presidents were neither seen nor heard.

Of course, this is in part a deliberate strategic choice by the White House, playing on the contrast with Trump and limiting Bidens exposure to the media to avoid distractions (and gaffes). Being a notably low-voltage political figure worked for Biden in his comeback primary campaign and in the 2020 general election, so why not as president?

As a result, Biden strangely doesnt feel like the main event of the Biden years.

Assuming it arrives, the midterm backlash in 2022 wont be directly about Biden; instead, it will be driven by the Biden-adjacent issues of the border, crime, critical race theory andif they reemerge in forcemask mandates and school closures.

Biden is the prime driver of only one of these issues, the crisis at the border that easily could have been avoided by keeping in place the policies the Trump administration had implemented to get control of the flow of migrants.

Otherwise, they are hot buttons where others besides Biden are the key players, whether governors, mayors, school boards, or education bureaucrats.

In other words, the culture war itself is likely to be the overwhelming issue in 2022, rather than the president.

This would be a marked departure from the midterm shellackings that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama got in 1994 and 2010, which were deeply personal rejections of both men (Clinton was viewed as a draft dodger unworthy of the office and Obama as a crypto-socialist hostile to American exceptionalism).

If no one on the right is enamored of Biden or his agenda, very little energy is invested in opposing him as such.

Indeed, the idea that tends to generate the most interest and passion isnt that the president is assiduously working to destroy the American way of life so much as Bidenwhose verbal meanderings can be truly bizarreisnt in charge at all.

Given the alternatives, this probably works in Bidens favor. He is pushing a truly radical spending agenda that would, if championed by a more in-your-face progressive president rather than someone who feels like a caretaker, surely be met with much fiercer resistance.

But there are risks to Biden, too. If his spending agenda flounders, its not clear what comes next. Even if the White House decides to try to unleash Biden, he is not not obviously well-suited to rallying the country or driving an agenda. Hes always been a talker, but never an orator.

His low-intensity presidency may, as his advisers hope, help create a sense of a return to normality in Washington, but it easily could be consistent with a disturbing sense of drift. Usually, the dynamic of the presidency is if you dont seem to be in control of events, they are in control of you.

The test for Biden will be if, eventually, he has to be the dominant public figure in his own presidency.

Excerpt from:
Opinion | The Biden Era Has Surprisingly Little of Joe Biden in It - POLITICO