Joe Biden enters his second year in office down in the polls, with a pandemic dragging on and nearly a third of Americans still hesitant to get vaccinated, a recovering economy strained by inflation and an unpredictable supply chain.
He’s presided over the roll out of trillions of dollars in healthcare funding and stimulus payments, seen the unemployment rate drop to 4.2%, made COVID-19 vaccines available for free to everyone in the country over 5 years old, and signed a trillion dollar infrastructure law. But voters, fatigued by the uncertainties of the pandemic, have seemed reluctant to give him credit, and by fall, Biden’s approval rating dropped below 50%.
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That puts him in a precarious position heading into 2022. With an evenly divided Senate and a narrow majority in the House, Democrats may lose control of Congress in the midterm elections in November. The checklist of what Biden wants to accomplish in his second year in office has to be ticked off with a limited amount of political capital, and a limited amount of time.
Infighting among Democrats has already delayed the next raft of Biden’s priorities, including expanding paid family leave and access to health care and child care. And campaign promises to pass voting rights legislation and police reform have seen little progress.
Here are six key challenges facing Biden in 2022.
It’s the pandemic, stupid
How the country fares in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 is likely to be the single biggest factor impacting what Biden can accomplish and how he will be judged, experts say. “The virus is going to determine what the second year looks like” for President Biden, says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University.
As the Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly through the population, scientists and medical experts are watching to see how the new mutation behaves and spreads and what additional measures need to be taken.
The new variant has given more…
Source : time
