The Memo: Biden's overpromising problem | TheHill

President BidenJoe BidenMcConnell: Rounds 'told the truth' about 2020 election Abrams thanks Biden for Georgia speech, backs call for Senate rules change Overnight Health Care — Biden officials take heat at Senate hearing MORE’s troubles are coalescing into one major problem — the perception that he promised more than he has delivered.The days when left-wingers like Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersPresident Biden is blaming everyone else for surging inflation  Historic health care expansion to take center stage in California America is less secure with an isolationist foreign policy MORE (I-Vt.) predicted Biden could be the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt look long gone.Biden’s own claim, made six months ago, that the nation was on the brink of defeating the COVID-19 pandemic sounds equally anachronistic.A University of Massachusetts Amherst/YouGov poll released Tuesday indicated that 55 percent of adults felt Biden had “fallen short of expectations” — way up from the 36 percent who felt that way in a previous UMass survey in April.There is no sign of a corner being turned. “The path forward is to actually enact policies that address the pain people are feeling across the country, not pretend that pain doesn’t exist.”Johnetta Elzie, a prominent civil rights activist, told this column that Biden’s effort on voting rights was “definitely late” and should have been granted “top priority” long before now.Taking a wider view, Elzie characterized Biden as returning to the moderate incrementalism that marked his three decades in the Senate — the same record that made the left so wary of him during the 2020 Democratic primary process.Elzie argued that, in the run-up to the 2020 election in particular, Biden had engaged in “some kind of performance of being more progressive than he actually is.