Guest post by Noel Holston

You know what Joe Biden’s biggest problem is? He’s boring.

That ought to be a good thing, because he’s boring in the positive sense of the term, boring like President Dwight D. Eisenhower was boring. Like Ike, Joe gets things done, maintains his composure, doesn’t dance.

Remember how they called Biden’s Democratic predecessor “no drama Obama”? Comparatively speaking, Obama is Jim Carrey to Joe’s Gary Cooper.

Some of us believed that this was what we wanted — and what the nation needed — after four years of Donald J. Trump’s tweeting, bleating, bragging, lying, bitching and preening. But whether you worshiped The Donald or recoiled at the sight of him, he got us all accustomed to having a President who was a noisy, ongoing public spectacle, a Fast and Furious binge-watch.

Trump only accelerated a trend, however. Climb aboard the Wayback Machine with me for a moment.

Barrack Obama didn’t call himself a rock star or sell himself as such, but once the label was suggested, he took to the role with ease and enthusiasm. Silver spooner George W. Bush had has good ol’ boy act and his flight suit. Bill Clinton had his Arkansas drawl, his sax and his sex appeal. Ronald Reagan was our first “acting” President.

The trend is usually traced back to JFK. He was our first made-by-TV President, quick with the quip, athletic, married to glamour. He probably wouldn’t have beaten Richard Nixon — a one-man psychodrama to come — if he hadn’t been better looking.

Biden, then, is at a distinct disadvantage. He’s just plain Joe, and he’s gotten plainer and paler and slower moving with age.

Which is not to say he’s incompetent. Far from it. It’s just that he doesn’t make the applause meters go haywire. As result, his administration’s real, impressive accomplishments don’t get the respect they’re due.

He’s been President 14 months. He got his historic, decades overdue infrastructure bill passed in 10. The Affordable Health Care Act — Obamacare — took 14.

Dealing with the pandemic, Biden has acted methodically and scientifically to limit the spread and slow the Covid death toll despite the efforts of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers that his predecessor had encouraged.

On his greatest foreign policy challenge, Biden has been caught between Americans who want us to boot the Russians out of Ukraine militarily and the who’d like a Putin type, if not Putin himself, to be our President. And that’s just the Republicans.

Still, Biden has handled the crisis with resolve and caution, encouraging our NATO allies without hogging the spotlight. His worst “gaffe,” supposedly, was to intimate that Vladimir Putin murderous assault cannot be forgiven. I’ll take a President who feels moral outrage over one who’s morally outrageous any day.

Biden’s great bungle, supposedly, was our military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. It probably could have been handled better, though whatever “better” might have looked like would have been panned in some quarters anyway.

Just don’t forget that he bit that bullet, shouldered that responsibility, and foreclosed a boondoggle that three previous Presidents did not. And in doing so, he incalculably improved the standing from which we could condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Yes, inflation is cancelling some of the gains of an otherwise booming economy, and while economists point out that pent-up pandemic demand and complicated supply chain snarls would be inflationary factors no matter who was President, Biden is the one who (really, truly) won the election. Inflation is his problem to deal with, and he is.

He hasn’t fixed immigration, reversed income inequality, halted climate change, stopped crime or cured cancer yet, either, but he has committed to those fights. And he hasn’t even served half his term yet.

His approval rating is stuck at a worrisome 41 percent, but I’d wager that if he just weren’t so unexciting, he’d be 10 or 15 points higher.

Maybe if he dyed his hair an unnatural color and learned to play the saxophone.

We do love a show.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his brilliance and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.