Whether the specific issue is abortion rights, court reform, voting rights, the filibuster, or the DOJ’s investigation into DONALD TRUMP’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, “[m]any Democrats share a sense that … Biden and his team have been following, not leading. And that tendency points to an enduring question about Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and was shaped by a clubbier, more cooperative Washington. Can he be the inspirational leader his party needs to counter the aggressive moves by Republicans in Congress and in the states, together with their appointees on the Supreme Court, to reverse long-held civil rights and even threaten democracy itself?”

TRESA UNDEM, a pollster for progressive causes, making it succinct: “Could anyone else have beaten Trump? I don’t think so. … But from the perspective of some Democratic voters [now], he just doesn’t get it. Biden will be presiding over this critical period when so many people are losing rights. Can you imagine being the president when women lost the right to abortion, and election subversion [is advancing], and the whole country is worried about democracy, and you are like, ‘The Supreme Court is just fine’?”

As our own Jonathan Lemire writes, even as Biden notched foreign policy wins in Europe, he’s in for a rude awakening as he returns home to the U.S., where he’ll “confront soaring inflation, surging gas prices, questions about his political future and a rage from his own party about a series of Supreme Court rulings.”