With inflation heading toward the 9% mark and gasoline at record-high prices, President Joe Biden risks going down in history as the man who both surpassed former President Donald Trump’s general disapproval ratings and whose stewardship of the economy ranks lower than Presidents Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover.
Biden might complain that history dealt him a poor hand. He exaggerates. The pandemic caused a sharp recession, but booms follow busts unless poor government decisions interfere. Biden also inherited not one but three vaccines. He can blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for sharp inflation, but Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine did not occur in a vacuum: Biden’s self-inflicted humiliation in Afghanistan surely played into the Kremlin’s calculus and sense of impunity.
The fact: The buck stops with Biden, even if inflation makes that buck worth far less than a year ago.
Printing trillions of extra dollars has consequences, but it needn’t be this bad. Among Biden’s first appointments was John Kerry as the first Cabinet-level climate envoy. Politically, it was a risky move. There was the bipartisan consensus when Kerry was a senator that he was the body’s most arrogant and condescending member. Kerry looks down on Biden and believes he would make a better president. As a former secretary of state, Kerry also was loath to accept lower stature or power.
Visiting heads of state and their entourages report that either Kerry or his trusted aides sit in almost every meeting they have with the Biden team when they visit Washington. Because almost all foreign visitors have known Biden for decades, they readily observe the president does not have the same acuity he had just a decade ago and question who dominates policymaking behind the scenes. Kerry is a prime suspect.
Kerry’s arrogance is not simply a personality flaw — it has profound policy implications. As secretary of state, Kerry did not believe law or financial prudence applied to him. When the Washington press corps criticized former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for dinners with prominent intellectuals and business leaders, they were wrong. Commerce is at the cutting edge of foreign policy, and no foreign policy is worth its salt if middle America doesn’t accept it or if Washington leaders cannot be bothered to explain it to those outside the Amtrak corridor. Kerry, meanwhile, got a free pass from the press when he took his whole entourage on a multimillion-dollar junket to Antarctica to meet with scientists to discuss climate change. He cared little for the fossil fuels burnt to get there, that Skype could suffice, and that the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Antarctic Program govern U.S. personnel and research stations on the southern continent and not the State Department.
Kerry summarized his general attitude toward ordinary people when he visited Iceland to pick up a climate award. “It’s the only choice for somebody like me,” he said when criticized for taking a private jet rather than flying commercial.
As the Biden whisperer, Kerry is more responsible than most for the energy crunch. Upon coming to office, Biden canceled pipelines and kneecapped America’s energy independence as rising gas prices, which have more than doubled in Biden’s term, drive people to desperation and contribute to food inflation. Kerry seems not to care: Living off the public dole while in government and married into money as a private citizen, he doesn’t feel the pain. Instead, he seems to want to drive and prolong the crisis to transform the economy and energy profile permanently.
Not only will he condemn Biden’s legacy, but he will also fail. Put aside the fact that his understanding of the science is less than he believes and that burning fossil fuels today is far more efficient and clean than a quarter of a century ago. Affluent societies protect the environment more than impoverished ones. To impoverish people knowingly, purposely, and callously in pursuit of a personal agenda is obtuse. To do so absent the check and balance of senate confirmation violates the spirit of the constitution. This rubs the public the wrong way and breeds cynicism toward government.
Biden will never be a great president, but he can step back from the precipice with a simple move: Fire John Kerry.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
