President Joe Biden promised he would “shut down” COVID-19. He arguably made this the main case for voting for him.

Now, he’s admitting that his presidency has been a failure.

COVID is why Biden was elected. Biden promised that he would “shut down the virus.” Chief of staff Ron Klain decried former President Donald Trump's “Articles of Confederation” approach to COVID, stating that the federal government had to solve the pandemic. He promised Biden would do just that. Vice President Kamala Harris promised that the first thing she and Biden would do is “get this virus under control.”

Now, Biden is waving the white flag. He has now told governors that there was “no federal solution” to the virus and “this gets solved at the state level." It’s a stark difference from a few months ago, when he was telling GOP governors to “get out of the way” of the federal government.

It was obvious that the federal government could not “solve” COVID. It was clear that states, which have huge bureaucracies dedicated to such things as vaccine distribution and health restrictions upon residents, would be primarily responsible for dealing with the virus once it arrived in the U.S.

But Biden pitched himself as the hero who would erase COVID, reopen society, and rejuvenate the economy. Biden told voters that the country could put the virus in the rearview mirror if the right man was in the White House, and he told them he was that man.

By now claiming that there is no federal solution, Biden is admitting that he has failed to deliver on the biggest promise of his campaign.

Biden has botched multiple issues. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a collection of blunders tied up in a bow by a drone strike that killed an aid worker and several children. He promised that “America is back” on the world stage, only to alienate allies and leave them out to dry. He is tougher on GOP-run states' voter integrity measures than he is on China's genocide.

But the pandemic was what Biden ran on. This was the core issue of his campaign. Now, even he is admitting that he has failed as president.

This should be another reminder that politicians making grand promises about how they can fix things should always be treated with skepticism. That is especially true when the politician in question has a history of failure and began his political career nearly 50 years ago. Biden’s presidency was always going to be a failure, and now, even he is being forced to admit it.