By Chris Satullo

Put a gun to my head and I’ll admit it: I’d prefer that Joe Biden not be the Democratic nominee in 2024.

But do I want Biden to announce he won’t run, as many in the party’s progressive wing have been clamoring for him to do?

No, because that would be a stone-cold stupid idea.

It would make Biden the lamest of lame ducks even before the halfway mark of his first term. If you think the Democrats seem remarkably unable to get their legislative and political act together now, just imagine how bad it would get once pretenders and contenders for the 2024 nomination felt free to declare – and act upon – their lust for the Oval Office.

I know Biden’s approval ratings are low, while gas prices and inflation are high (though gas prices have lately fallen). And, yes, the video of him falling off his bike in Delaware has a gazillion views on YouTube.

But do you recall the last time inflation was as high as its current 9.1 percent for July? That happened in the first two years of Ronald Reagan’s first term. In fact, it soared to 11 percent in the Great Communicator’s first year. In the middle of that first term, Reagan’s approval rating bottomed out at 35 percent, just a tick above Biden’s 33. (It’s always the darkest just before Morning in America.)

Ronnie’s peak approval rating (68 percent) only slightly tops Biden’s (63 percent). Wondering what Trump’s peak was? A paltry 49 percent.

So, is it really all as hopeless as some despairing Dems (and chortling Fox pundits) claim?

We are 27 months away from the next presidential election. This is an eternity in politics, even though political reporters often seem to have a hard time keeping that in mind. (Even more so now, when so much political reporting is done by journalists who weren’t born when Bill Clinton won the White House the first time.) 

This, of course, doesn’t stop the denizens of progressive Twitter from trumpeting their usual fierce impatience with any Democratic politician who cannot magically surmount basic political math and the limits of the U.S. Constitution to make all their fever dreams come true.

Biden is being pelted with critiques from the center as well as the left. (Let’s just ignore, shall we, the shrill, predictable howls from Fox News and other outlets where facts long ago ceased to matter.) The centrist complaints hinge on a “we told you so” sneer about inflation. After decades of false warnings that massive federal spending would fuel inflation, deficit hawks are finally having their moment. Today’s inflation rate is, in fact, really bad. Biden’s big pandemic relief and infrastructure bills seem to have had more inflationary impact than many Democrats (including me) had hoped. Even Paul Krugman admits he was wrong, a little bit, on this one.

Inflation is what social scientists call a “wicked problem,” meaning a deep-reaching one with many causes and no magic bullet solution. Progressives (and I do count myself in their camp on this point) would always trade a little inflation for a powerful improvement in jobless rates. And Biden’s policies did help curtail unemployment: down to a low, low 3.6 percent – from 6.4 percent when he took office. That tightening of the labor pool has also produced wage increases that soften inflation’s impact for many. Wages were up 6.4 percent year over year as of June.

Still, despite all that, 9.1 percent inflation is no joke. It is unhealthy and unsustainable. But why is it so severe right now? Biden/Democratic spending is far from the only cause.

If you’ve ever swooned over Ukraine’s brave president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted on social media that you “stand with Ukraine” or hung a blue and yellow flag on your porch, I implore you to pay attention to the following:

Gas prices averaged $3.23 a gallon last July. They rose steadily from there. Oil companies had slowed production during the worst of the pandemic and didn’t ramp up quickly enough to meet demand as American lives emerged from lockdown mode. The per-gallon price stood at $3.61, up 38 cents, last February.

Then what happened? Russia invaded Ukraine.  

Biden, responding properly to this totalitarian aggression against a democratic ally, slapped sanctions on Russia. Before sanctions, the U.S. got eight percent of its oil from Russia; Europe got even more. Unsurprisingly, gas prices skyrocketed to $5.03 a gallon.

If you’ve ever waxed lyrical about Ukraine, understand that higher gas prices are part and parcel of supporting that embattled land. Ignore this point and you’re a bloody hypocrite.

As weeping at the pump mounted, critics chanted “Why doesn’t Biden do something?” Well, he did something, releasing a huge flow from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserves.  The price average now has dropped to $4.44. So is everyone singing hosannas to Joe’s deft response? Not.

Putin’s war also inflated food prices. Ukraine is a major agricultural exporter, so the war – and its related impact on shipping routes – contribute significantly to the 12.2 percent rise in food prices over the last year.

Sometimes doing the right thing has a cost.  Biden did the right thing on Ukraine, and it’s costing Americans at the pump and costing him with Gallup et. al. – in part because Americans, never great at connecting geopolitical dots, have become truly terrible at it.

To Biden’s left, meanwhile, the progressive critique is different and multi-pronged. That darn Biden, they complain, did not:

•  Prevent the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling on abortion.
•  Get a bold climate change package through Congress.
•  Eliminate all racism from our criminal justice system.
•  End gun violence (even though the current state of Second Amendment law doesn’t     allow Biden to do a tenth of what activists demand).
•  Overturn an embedded tax and regulatory system that has allowed corporations to keep an ever-increasing percentage of the fruits of their workers’ labor.
•  Force Trump’s supporters to stop being ignorant, conspiracy-minded, un-woke jerks.
•  Emit enough fierce “fighting” noises about all of the above.

This indictment comes largely from people who stand firmly in the “wishing makes it so” camp, who cannot seem to get it through their heads that large swaths of America disagree with them, who seem oblivious to the limits on what a president can accomplish while faced with a 50-50 Senate and a hostile Supreme Court, and who can’t seem to admit that the Dobbs decision happened to a large degree because their contingent blew two big presidential elections (2000 and 2016) by indulging in election-year fantasies about Ralph Nader and Jill Stein. That allowed two Republican presidents to slip into office while losing the popular vote, giving them the power to create that 6-3 Dobbs majority.

As Republican consultant/commentator Tim Miller recently put it with typical pungency in The Bulwark:

“Cut the dude some slack. The Republicans spent a half century with a single-minded focus of getting judges on the court who would overturn Roe, while Democrats’ voting emphasis on judges was spotty, at best. Now…Democratic activists want Biden to reverse all that with some made-up executive powers and a 50-50 Senate? This is NGH (not gonna happen). And influencers who are claiming that it is doable are just inflaming their own supporters for no good purpose.”

Lord knows, Biden has not been perfect. He surely doesn’t look like a guy who’s going to be at peak dynamism by the time, say, 2026 rolls around. He isn’t even the best candidate the Dems could put up (Paging Mayor Pete! Paging Mayor Pete!).

But calls for him to throw himself under the bus at this juncture are political malpractice. They wildly overvalue the transitory approval ratings of a given moment. And they ignore other salient poll results; as ex-conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes, also of The Bulwark (you should read it) recently put it, in 2024 Biden would not be running “against the ghost of FDR, or a generic Republican. He wouldn’t be constantly compared with a mythical progressive pol who could magically enact sweeping spending plans in an evenly divided Congress. The alternative would be Trump.“

Or a MAGA clone who supported the coup and whose social stands would undo decades of progress for women, gays and people of color.

A recent NYT/Siena poll had Biden, at the nadir of his popularity, besting Trump 44 percent to 41 percent – even before the impact of the Jan. 6 hearings has fully hit home for independent and moderate Republican voters.

So say it ain’t so, Joe, until the ripe time comes, about 16 months from now, to admit that it is time to hang ’em up.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia