President Biden hits the traditionally symbolic first-100-days mark of his presidency this week, and "it has dawned on Republicans that the man their standard-bearer once mocked as 'Sleepy Joe' is a formidable adversary," Jonathan Chait writes in New York on Monday. "And the quality that has made him so effective up to this point is, well, his sleepiness." Before Biden's immediate predecessor, the last handful of presidents were "nice," but Biden is "also tedious," Chait argues:
He is relentlessly enacting an ambitious domestic agenda — signing legislation that could cut child poverty by more than half, expanding ObamaCare, and injecting the economy with a stimulus more than twice the size of what [President Barack] Obama's Congress passed in 2009 — while arousing hardly any controversy. There's nothing in Biden's vanilla-ice-cream bromides for his critics to hook on to. Republicans can't stop Biden because he is boring them to death. [Jonathan Chait, New York]
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