Dueling narratives: Biden’s pandemic progress could be overshadowed by border crisis

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Joe Biden’s presidency is either off to a roaring start or a disastrous debut.

I’m not talking here about the stark differences in how liberals and conservatives view the new president. It’s about two competing narratives, both of which are rooted in reality.

On one hand, Biden has pushed through nearly $2 trillion in Covid aid and economic relief, ramped up the vaccine program, set an empathetic tone, and is averaging 56 percent approval in Gallup polls—all while avoiding polarizing cultural fights.

On the other hand, Biden and his team have created a humanitarian disaster at the border, failed to anticipate the surge they invited and have no easy way to ease the crisis.

With 14,000 unaccompanied minors having crossed the border into Texas, this is not some tendentious tale pushed by right-wing media. Mainstream news organizations have been all over the border fiasco, and some Democrats have been highly critical as well.

If there’s a common thread here, it’s Biden’s core belief in government’s ability to make things better. This was a winning message in the midst of a pandemic that has caused so much suffering, and the president decided to go big with anti-poverty programs and other Democratic wish-list items. With millions already getting their $1,400 stimulus checks, it’s hardly abstract legislation—and Biden will benefit if turning on the spigot irrigates an economic renaissance.

Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column, says Biden was never at Barack Obama’s "cool kids’ table," but "now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas."

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Now plenty could go wrong. The virus could worsen again, either through new variants or a widespread refusal to get vaccinated. The economy could overheat, or the new law could come to be viewed as wasteful.

And Biden’s relatively low profile—he finally holds his first news conference this week—could fuel a sense that he’s not fully in charge, rather than as a self-effacing way to lower the national temperature.

But a failure to control the border would greatly undermine Biden’s reputation for competence long after the stimulus money has been spent. And it’s largely a self-inflicted wound.

Photos taken by Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, and obtained by Axios, show migrant kids in awful, overcrowded conditions—images we would have been seeing had the administration not blocked the media’s access to these facilities.

As the Washington Post reports, the country is on pace for as many as 2 million migrants at the southern border this year. "The situation at the border — which Biden and his advisers steadfastly refuse to call a crisis — is the result of an administration that was forewarned of the coming surge, yet still ill-prepared and lacking the capacity to deal with it. Administration officials have been plagued by muddled messaging, sometimes making appeals that seem directed more at liberal activists than the migrants they need to dissuade from coming to the country."

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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas didn’t do the White House any favors as he made the Sunday show rounds, mainly blaming the crisis on the Trump administration and appearing out of touch as he stiffly insisted "the border is closed." The fact is that Border Patrol isn’t turning away minors, and the administration just issued an $86-million contract for hotel rooms to house migrants seeking asylum. That doesn’t exactly send a "closed for business" message.

Little wonder that Donald Trump, who had his own struggles at the border, said in a statement that "the Biden administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster."

At the moment, the border crisis is like a dark shadow on the sunny horizon of Biden’s political success. But it could eventually darken the landscape unless the president can find a way to fix this mess without fully abandoning his compassionate ideals.