BTRTN: The Biden Dream of a 2022 Comeback Is Over...Right?
Born To Run The Numbers on the month of December, when gasoline was poured on three major fires facing the Biden administration: covid, inflation, and the intransigence of Manchin and Sinema. But is the darkest hour just before the dawn?
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2022/01/btrtn-biden-dream-of-2022-comeback-is.html
Excerpts: "When Joe Biden sat down for his Thanksgiving dinner, he surely pondered his prospects for 2022. He might have thought while his administration would face tough sledding in the coming months, the chances of a turnaround in 2022 were actually quite reasonable. He could envision a near-term (by summer?) reversal of a series of calamities that had plagued his presidency, dragged his approval rating “underwater” and threatened a midterm disaster. The big three issues on his mind would doubtless have been the ongoing COVID threat posed by the Delta variant, the sharp rise in inflation that had hit home with voters at the gas tank and supermarket line, and the stubborn intransigence of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in thwarting his efforts to pass his historic “soft” infrastructure bill...
"That rosy scenario began to collapse that very Thanksgiving night, when word came from South Africa of the brand-new Omicron, a variant that proved to be incredibly transmissible...soon thereafter it became clear that the rosy “transitory” scenario for inflation was overly optimistic as well...to cap off the utter destruction, Joe Manchin put the kibosh on the soft infrastructure bill...
"By month’s end, one might reasonably begin asking….is the Biden comeback dream for 2022 really dead? As Biden settled in for New Year’s Eve festivities, he might have allowed himself a few cautious notes for optimism..."