The pandemic has become a political nightmare for both Joe Biden and Boris Johnson

We don’t make excuses for politicians. And big errors sent Biden’s approval ratings plummeting: He downplayed raging inflation, overpromised on a pandemic that mocks political timetables and presided over a debacle in Afghanistan. But it’s also fair to ask whether any other modern president has faced the crescendo of crises that have haunted Biden.

He’s fighting a virus that has proved uncannily adept at exposing the social and political fault lines in US society. Many economic problems that are making him unpopular are global, not local, including the supply chain crunches making goods…