And, his usually reliable media is now openly questioning his competence.
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First, an explanation of the metric:
The Mendoza Line is an expression in baseball deriving from the name of shortstop Mario Mendoza, whose low batting average is taken to define the threshold of incompetent hitting.
This is often thought of as the threshold below which a player’s presence on a Major League Baseball team cannot be justified.
The term has come to be used in other contexts when one is so incompetent in one key skill that other skills cannot compensate for that deficiency.
In baseball, it’s dropping below a .200 batting average.
A presidential variant: A majority disapproving of job performance.
Well, Biden has hit the presidential Mendoza line in RCP’s poll-of polls … that’s not a single poll, it’s the composite of 8 politically balanced polls.
Note that the disapproval line had been increasing by about 1% each month until the Afghan fiasco … then it jumped about 4 percentage points during the botched withdrawal (despite ample air cover being provided by prevailing Bide-leaning media) … and is now trending at about a point a month again.
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A harbinger that the trend is likely to continue (or accelerate) is a recap by Townhall.com:
Across networks on Sunday morning, mainstream network anchors, panels, and reporters didn’t hold back in their criticism of President Biden’s ailing performance amid multiple crises at home and around the world, tempering their normally lavish praise to point out there are serious concerns over how the country is being run and Biden’s competency..
Some specifics offered up to support the point:
- NBC’s Chuck Todd: “It’s been a rough six weeks and it seems as if it’s only getting worse.”
- ABC’s Martha Radatz: “”What he has done so far, hasn’t really worked”.
- CBS’s David Martin: “Biden says the U.S. is going to prevent any any reconstitution of Al Qaeda with surveillance conducted from outside the country, drones flying over the horizon from outside the country… and that they will be able to detect a plot in the works and then be able to disrupt it with a drone strike. But you have to say that the mistake made in Kabul is not an encouraging precedent”.
- ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “Biden’s credibility on COVID has been what has driven his level of his popularity … and we’ve seen it eroded over the past several weeks.”
More generally, NBC’s Todd observed:
Biden’s got a pretty big credibility crisis on his hands because all of these problems in some ways, showed up after he said something basically the exact opposite.
He said that the Afghanistan withdrawal wasn’t going to be messy, that it wasn’t going to look like Saigon.
On booster shots, he came out and essentially said eight months and even indicated maybe we should start it as soon as five months.
Now we’re not sure if anybody under 65 is going to get a booster shot.
Of course the border, he said things were under control.
It’s pretty clear we have a bigger problem now than we’ve had in years and his policies have turned into becoming a magnet.
He’s got credibility issues on the world stage to make sure people still view America as not just a stable democracy but a competent leader of the free world right now
Whoa, Nellie.
Losing Chuck Todd is an indication that Biden might be facing another contagion…
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But, as a friend likes to ask: Who are the 46% who think Biden’s doing a good job?
Maybe they put a ceiling on his disapproval numbers…
The Homa Files 
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