Biden's shrewdly shrunken presidency

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For nearly 30 years, as our politics grew ever more bitter, we have also focused ever more intensely on the presidency. From Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, polarization kept increasing. Voters in each party gave less and less approval to presidents from the other one. Even their views of the economy became dependent on who was in the White House.

During Donald Trump's presidency, the character of the president became the top political issue. Trump's chief political goal often seemed to be to make sure that every conversation in the country was about him. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded.

But now, under President Biden, the trend has reversed. Biden implicitly campaigned on the promise that he would not demand as much attention as Trump. There would be a return to normality. In shrinking the presidency, however, he is the one who is breaking the recent norm. Compared with his recent predecessors — and not just Trump — Biden gives fewer interviews and takes more holidays.

Biden's lower profile is surely in part a reflection of his age, acuity and energy level. But it also seems to be a deliberate political strategy — and one that has worked.

To say that Biden is shrinking the presidency does not erase his legislative accomplishments, which have been impressive given the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress during his first two years in office. It does, however, explain how a lot of those accomplishments happened.

Voters don't have Biden at the forefront of their minds, either, which has benefited his party. Midterm elections are typically referendums on the president. Those who disapprove of a president's performance, even mildly, usually vote to punish their party. In 2006, with Bush as president, voters who somewhat disapproved of him backed Democratic candidates for the House by 21 points. In 2014, under Obama, such voters sided with Republicans by 22 points. They voted against Trump's party by 29 points in 2018.

This year, voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden leaned slightly toward Democratic candidates for the House.

These voters, it is true, favored some Republicans. Brian Kemp, for example, won them in his campaign for re-election as governor of Georgia. But those mixed results show that these voters were evaluating the specific candidates running in individual races, not voting based on who is in the White House.

Republicans have tried to generate a backlash to Biden. Their attacks have been ineffective in part because he has downsized the presidency. At the same time, their ineffectiveness keeps him from becoming the dominant figure of our politics. In Bush's second term, Democrats motivated a lot of voters by portraying him as an incompetent theocrat. Republicans, in turn, had fused a personal and a political criticism of Obama: He was a liberal know-it-all. Trump was, well, Trump.

The one criticism of Biden that has stuck is that he is too old. That message raises doubts about his leadership and fitness for office but does not yield opposition and anger. It doesn't discredit his allies or his agenda. It might even elicit sympathy.

A diminished presidency might be a legacy that Biden and Trump share. Both have stretched the formal powers of the presidency. But Trump proved incapable of wielding those powers effectively. He had a poor track record of getting his own aides to obey him and had very little influence over the congressional agenda. Now Biden has reduced the presidency's imprint in our political culture.

In mid-January, the Republican National Committee sent out a news release noting how many vacation days he has taken and how few news conferences he has held. It said it was marking "2 years of Biden hiding." Around the same time, polls found Biden's popularity ticking up, perhaps because his absence has left the spotlight to Republican flaws and fights. The secret of Biden's success might be hiding in plain sight.