Commentary Why Joe Biden is such an elusive target for his critics

LONDON: As rumpuses go in calm, post-Trump Washington, it will have to do. This summer, Catholic bishops discussed withholding communion from no less a personage than the US president.

The gesture was twice foolish. First, whatever Joe Biden’s line on abortion, neither his pastor nor the Holy See support his exclusion.

Second, and here the clergy will have to forgive a dip into earthly politics, they only served to highlight the president’s stalwart churchgoing. There are White House staff who have done less sterling work for his image.

Here, in miniature, is US conservatism’s Biden problem. What he is â€" old, white, conventional to the marrow â€" strikes voters more vividly than what he does.

And so, after six bold and sometimes rash months as president, he is more or less unmarked by the slur of radicalism.

Even in its diminished state, his approval rating is above the 50 per cent that eluded his predecessor. After his first 100 days, which were hailed and damned for their largeness of ambition, voters saw him as more moderate than Barack Obama at the same point.

The telling comparisons do not stop with his old boss. Had a President Hillary Clinton pulled US forces from Afghanistan with Biden’s speed, she would have been framed as a peacenik. Who will try that line against the father of a veteran?

Had President Bernie Sanders overseen a national crime surge, it would have been pinned on the left’s innate laxity. Sponsorship of a severe crime bill in 1994 spares Biden that charge.

JOE BIDEN, THE FUDDY-DUDDY REFORMER

By dint of biography, even identity, the president has special latitude. With it, he is acting out that US paradox: The fuddy-duddy reformer.

Just as a blue blood, Franklin Roosevelt, made the New Deal, and a coarse Texan, Lyndon Johnson, passed civil rights, a 78-year-old bane of the left could enact three spending bills worth more than US$1 trillion each in one year.

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