Things look really bad for Biden, literally
Images from media coverage of Biden's anniversary in office weren't pretty
To know how bad President Joe Biden’s approval rating is right now, you don’t even need to look at the polls. Just check the cover of TIME magazine’s Jan. 31/Feb. 7 double issue.
The illustration, by Tim O’Brien, shows Biden under storm clouds in the Oval Office with his hand out, as if realizing there’s a 30% chance it’s already raining. It’s for a cover story on “How the Biden administration lost its way” by Molly Ball and Brian Bennett, and the coverline is “Year One.”
The news media marked Biden’s first year in office with images of storms and gloom. The pandemic’s not over, inflation’s on the rise, and Biden’s approval has fallen further than any modern president going back at least to Ronald Reagan. He remains more popular than former President Donald Trump at this point in his presidency, but not by much. As TIME put it, “An Administration that pledged to restore competence and normalcy seems overmatched and reactive.”
The “Year One” cover is the latest in an ongoing series by O’Brien, the first of such a series in the magazine’s history. It began with Trump at the resolute desk as the wind blows papers away in “Nothing to See Here” (Feb. 27, 2017). The storm grew in a follow-up “Stormy” cover (April 23, 2018) that turned into a flood by “In Deep” (Sept. 3, 2018).
By 2020’s “Plague Election” cover, Trump had been washed out of the White House. And in 2021, O’Brien illustrated Biden in a trashed Oval Office for “Day One,” below. The storm had abated, but there was a lot of work to do.
“A year later, Biden sits at the resolute desk, with mounting tasks and threats and a persistent COVID pandemic all still lingering,” O’Brien told TIME about the new “Year One” cover. “The country needs him to rise to the moment before it really starts raining.”
Several newspapers used an AP photo of Biden listening to a reporter’s question during his press conference last Wednesday with his head down by Susan Walsh for their stories about his first year in office. The headlines weren’t great, like “Biden: Americans weary from COVID” in the Arizona Republic, and “Biden dials back agenda” in the Star Tribune.
Lee Enterprises, which runs 90 newspapers in small- and medium-sized markets, used the headline “Virus and division plague president,” with an AP photo of Biden on a call with the White House COVID-19 Response Team in December by Carolyn Kaster.
The New York Times’ visual take on Biden’s first year was messy and disjointed.
For the Times Sunday Review, the headline “Things are still not normal,” was laid out by designer Braulio Amado like it fell off the coconut tree in ‘Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.” A diced-up photo of Biden was similarly tumbled. And for a story about a focus group of independent voters, an editorial illustration by Cristiana Couceiro shows Biden with scribbled-on coronaviruses and “Build Back Better” and “Hope” crossed out.
In the Times’ focus group, Kristine, a 50-year-old construction project manager from Arizona who is white, said Biden was “out of touch”; Tenae, a 44-year-old director of security dispatch from California who is Black, said Biden was “incoherent”; and Don, a 36-year-old elementary school educator from Georgia who is multiracial, called Biden a “functional adult.” When asked if Biden exceeded anyone’s expectations, no one in the focus group raised their hand.
Bloomberg Businessweek wrote that Biden’s presidency has hit a wall, and illustrator Kati Szilagyi, who did the magazine’s “Move fast and fix things” cover about Biden last spring, returned for art on the story. She depicted Biden in a storm for one image, and another of him climbing up a mountain, facing issues like inflation, the pandemic, and voting rights.
“On the timeline imagined by the White House when he took office a year ago, widely available vaccines would have effectively ended the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. by now. The economy would be growing strongly, and a narrowly divided Congress would have already passed the bulk of Biden’s agenda,” Businessweek’s Nancy Cook and Josh Wingrove wrote.
Despite his setbacks, Biden is pushing forward. He said last week he believes “big chunks” of Build Back Better can still pass, and the White House touted a year of progress on fronts like vaccines and jobs.
“Two things can be true at the same time: We can have a lot of work to do and have done a lot already,” Biden deputy national climate adviser Ali Zaidi told Businessweek.
The challenges are tough, but there’s still time for Biden to turn it around. If TIME ever drops another cover of him in an even nastier Oval Office storm, though, then we’ll know he’s really in trouble.
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