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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics,

life and culture. My name is Freddie Gray.

I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I'm delighted to be joined by Julie Norman,

who is co-director at the Centre on US Politics

at University College London.

And we're going to be doing something a little bit different for Americano

because I think we've spent a good year and a bit now saying that President Joe Biden is a disaster, so much so that sometimes I worry.

In fact, some of our listeners have said that we're becoming very partisan and we try not to be partisan here at The Spectators.

So, Julia, I think you're willing to make the case for the defense for the

presidency of Joe Biden so far. So without wanting to prejudice anything, I think I'll just

ask you to start by defending Joe Biden's presidency so far. Sure thing. Well, I'll just start by

saying, you know, we know that Biden's approval ratings are very low right now. They're hovering around

41%. But if you look

back at his whole first year in total, he did have a number of successes. And he came out of the

gates very quickly, really trying to tackle two main things. Of course, COVID and the economy. And he did

both those things somewhat well. The administration

introduced a very rapid vaccination campaign that had most Americans who wanted to be vaccinated,

vaccinated by mid-July. He was able to pass a $1.9 trillion relief package to Congress that got a lot of extra aid to families and got a lot

of support for COVID relief. So right out of the bat, he had some very early successes and many

...