The president who could not choose

“To govern is to choose, however difficult the choices may be.”

—Pierre Mendès France, prime minister of France 1954–’55

If you want to understand where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong, when his administration stopped looking like Barack Obama’s and started looking like Jimmy Carter’s, you could start with the failure of Build Back Better.

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.