Sour smell of success: A President under attack for doing what he was elected to do

For a guy who seems to be doing exactly what he was elected to do, President Joe Biden finds himself under bitter attack. Most of the attacks are from people who simply want him to fail, but as last week's poor performance by Democratic candidates showed, not all of them are. The president's approval ratings are curiously low inasmuch as, since taking office, his administration has substantially lifted the country out of the ditch it was in on Inauguration Day.

On Friday morning, the Department of Labor reported that the economy had added 531,000 jobs in October, bringing the number of jobs created during the first nine months of the Biden administration to 5.6 million. The unemployment rate, which had been 6.3% in January 2021, is now down to 4.6%. Biden's American Rescue Plan, enacted in March, kept America afloat while his team pushed, pressed and prodded Americans to get vaccinated against the virus that has killed 775,000 Americans and severely damaged our economy. Despite the sneering and disinformation from the predictable quarters, the number of Americans who are fully vaccinated is fast approaching 200 million.

Late Friday, Congress passed Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure package, a long-overdue public works program that is the largest of its kind since the Eisenhower presidency. It will likely soon be followed by a massive, historic bill that will address the dire need for clean energy, provide for universal preschool and expand efforts to combat child poverty.

You wouldn't know this by listening to the thunder on the Right, which has produced the customary inanity.

Folks who demand that the government dictate that women must give birth against their wills denounce policies requiring COVID-19 vaccinations, invoking a heretofore unrecognized constitutional right to infect others with a deadly, incurable disease. Those born too late to sue George Washington to block him from ordering his troops to be inoculated against smallpox are trying to make up for it: Despite a long history of requiring Americans to be immunized before participating in certain activities, these newcomers to civil rights causes maintain that requiring Americans to protect their fellow Americans from a lethal virus is un-American.

Over in the Senate, noted civil libertarian Ted Cruz, positioning himself to capture the Third Reich revivalist wing of the 2024 Republican presidential primary vote, lectured Attorney General Merrick Garland that it is everyone's God-given constitutional right to give the Nazi salute at school board meetings.

Then there are the cries that the president is to blame for disruptions in the global supply chain. These cries are mindless, but no matter: mindlessness in defense of the conning of people is no vice. The factories that manufacture many of our products are located in countries that have been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic, and many have been shuttered or limited in their output. Shipping containers have been scarce. Blaming this on Biden is preposterous, but not any more preposterous than blaming it on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who had the nerve to take a short period of time away from the office to look after his newborn twins. Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, always good for sixth-grade-level wit, did not disappoint, mocking Buttigieg, who adopted the twins with his husband Chasten, for being gay. "Paternity leave, they call it?" Carlson smirked. "Trying to figure out how to breastfeed. No word on how that went." Meanwhile, one of those infants just returned home after three weeks of urgent medical treatment, including time on a ventilator. No word on whether Carlson felt a moment's remorse for his stupidity, or even grasped it.

The snarkiness has not been from the Right alone. "Many who were sick of Trump chaos and ineptitude are now sick of Biden chaos and ineptitude," grumped New York Times snarkmeister Maureen Dowd shortly before Friday's jobs report and passage of Biden's infrastructure bill. But if what has been achieved since Biden took office qualifies as chaos and ineptitude, here's to more of it.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

This article originally appeared on Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: Sour smell of success: A President under attack for doing what he was elected to do