#American optimism drops 20 points to mark Biden’s six months in office

The honeymoon is officially over. Americans’ optimism about the country’s direction has plummeted almost 20 points since the spring. Sadly, that’s a rational reaction to President Joe Biden’s first six months.

It’s not just that the public gives the prez low marks on his handling (non-handling is more like it) of the surge at the southern border and the surge in shootings on our streets. There are also worries about rapid inflation and new lockdowns in the face of the Delta variant — problems Team Biden is plainly making worse.

In the ABC News/Ipsos poll, just 45 percent of Americans are optimistic about the country’s direction this coming year, down from 64 percent in early May. And the drop was about the same 20 points for Republicans and Democrats — and worse, 26 points, for independents.

It’s no wonder. Consumer prices rose 5.4 percent in June from a year earlier, the biggest monthly jump since right before the 2008 financial crisis. Even the post-pandemic recovery seems at risk, as new unemployment claims jumped last week to 419,000, the highest level since mid-May and more than twice the average in pre-pandemic 2019.

Yet Biden claims there’s “no evidence” his expanded jobless benefits slowed the return to work and refuses to admit his vast spending plans threaten even more inflation.

Crucially, Biden’s handling of the pandemic got its lowest rating yet, with 63 percent approval. That’s better than he’s earned.

The prez took credit for the vaccines President Donald Trump got off the ground, but he missed his own target of getting 70 percent of adults their first shot by July 4 and still hasn’t met it. Meanwhile, his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, is talking about another mask mandate while Americans worry about more lockdowns.

Getting Americans jabbed should have been Biden’s overwhelming priority. Yet his team clearly underestimated the challenge — despite such known facts as: Many of us won’t even get the flu vaccine, and even health-care workers are notoriously vax-resistant.

Worse, he put his focus instead on an utterly partisan crusade to transform the nation with a vastly bigger federal government. First, he insisted on his overlarge “relief” bill, passing it on a party-line vote that only deepened the divide in Congress.

Then he began a feckless drive for another $6 trillion in new spending, aiming to rival FDR when his party barely controls either house of Congress. He also burned energy and political capital with “Jim Crow” nonsense about Republican efforts to slightly tighten election security and embraced the left’s incredibly divisive “systemic racism” obsession.

All while the vaccine effort flagged. And now his administration is feeding false fears of doom over Delta.

If Biden had governed as he promised on Inauguration Day, seeking unity, he could have passed a series of modest bipartisan bills targeted at the nation’s real needs, while focusing on the serious challenge of jabbing the whole country to guarantee a return to normalcy and the booming pre-COVID economy. But he chose to chase “historic victories” and so deepened political divisions while sowing economic trouble.

Ironically, a president elected mainly to be different from the last guy has been all about feeding his own ego — and earning this huge loss in public confidence.