After Biden's first year, the virus and disunity rage on

And people under 40 have never seen inflation like this.Only two days after Biden’s lacerating speech in Atlanta invoking the darkest days of segregation, he saw his voting rights legislation run aground when Democratic Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona announced her opposition to changing Senate rules to allow the bill to pass by a simple majority.Her rationale: Altering the rules would only “worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”For all of that, Barack Obama was on to something when he paid his old vice president an odd compliment late in the 2020 campaign. The Trump-era political muzzle came off public health authorities, freeing them to confuse the public all on their own.First lady Jill Biden’s studded “Love” jacket at a global summit not-so-subtly countered the “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket her predecessor wore on her flight to a migrant child detention center.Instead of promising the world and delivering a Potemkin village (as when Trump declared the virus “very much under control” in February 2020), the Biden White House set pandemic and other goals that were modest to a fault, then exceeded them. More than 6 million people are back at work and half a billion COVID-19 vaccines have been put in arms, but the nation has a long way to go to return to its pre-pandemic state.“I think it’s a lot of achievements, a lot of accomplishment, in the face of some very serious obstacles,” Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, told The Associated Press on the cusp of Biden’s second year in office. “The Biden presidency remains a work in progress.”Matthew Delmont, a civil rights historian at Dartmouth, expected more from Biden by virtue of Biden’s decades of experience as a savvy operator in the capital.He had anticipated a far more effective COVID-19 response and more urgency, sooner, in countering the rollback of voting rights and tilting of election rules that Republicans are attempting across the country.“There’s something to be said for the professionalism of the White House and not going from one fire to the next,” Delmont said. “While there are vast partisan differences in how Biden is seen, in general he is seen as stable but not forceful,” he said.That’s how Biden has come across to John Ferguson, a retired diplomatic officer in Lovettsville, Virginia, who considers Biden “infinitely better than Trump” but adds: “He seems to give a speech every four hours and he’s not very good at it.”In large measure, Biden’s innate civility and predictability brought the sort of climate change that the world could get behind.Here once more was a president who believed deeply in alliances and vowed to repair an American reputation frayed by the provocateur in office before him. People who care about human rights welcome U.S. leadership on tough sanctions for China and Myanmar over their vicious mistreatment of minorities.Overlaying everything, domestic or foreign, is a constant foreboding in the White House over what Trump might do next.A year ago Trump left Washington for Florida, breaking one last tradition as president by refusing to attend Biden’s inauguration.