Biden has a plan and chastened middle America is ready to listen
If anyone can help America heal, it’s Uncle Joe, a man with a unique sense of mission, writes Sarah Baxter from Washington DC.
Before an empty National Mall, surrounded by razor wire, in a capital that has not hosted this many troops since America’s Civil War, Joe Biden is going to have to make the speech of his life on inauguration day tomorrow.
This is his moment, one for the history books. It is no longer about Good Ol’ Joe, the faithful sidekick to Barack Obama, finally getting the recognition he deserves. It is about whether Biden can rise to be the father of the nation after the ‘‘American carnage’’ Donald Trump portrayed in his own inauguration address came to pass.
All the trials and tribulations of Biden’s life – the personal tragedies, the decades of dogged service in the Senate, the failed presidential campaigns – have converged to give him a unique sense of mission.
For him, the long wait for the keys to the White House at last makes sense. But at 78, can he shoulder the burden of a nation riven by a pandemic that has cost nearly 400,000 lives, as well as a shocking level of political division? Never one to sell himself short, the good news is that he thinks he can.
A month before the election, on October 6, Biden gave a speech at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln in 1863 promised America ‘‘a new birth of freedom’’. There was ‘‘no more fitting place’’, Biden said, ‘‘to talk about the cost of division . . . and about why I believe in this moment, we must come together as a nation’’.
With all eyes on Trump, Biden’s speech did not create much of a stir. In hindsight, however, it appears prophetic – and offers a possible template for his inaugural address.
‘‘I made the decision to run for president after Charlottesville,’’ Biden said. ‘‘Close your eyes and remember what you saw. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK coming out of the fields with torches alight, veins bulging, chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s. It was hate on the march, in the open, in America.’’
For Charlottesville, Virginia, the scene of a notorious white supremacist rally in 2017, substitute the storming of the Capitol. Some of the same crowd of haters were at both events. ‘‘You don’t have to agree with me on everything, or even on most things, to see what we’re experiencing today is neither good nor normal,’’ said Biden. ‘‘Too many Americans see our public life not as an arena for mediation of our differences, but . . . as an occasion for total, unrelenting, partisan warfare.’’
Biden described himself as a ‘‘proud Democrat’’ but went on to promise: ‘‘I will govern as an
American president. I’ll work with Democrats and Republicans. I’ll work as hard for those who don’t support me as those who do. That’s the job of president, the duty to care for everyone.’’
He then took a moment to laugh at himself. ‘‘I’m accused of being naive. I’m told, ‘Maybe that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way any more’. Well, I’m here to tell you they can, and they must.’’
America is paying attention. Trump loyalists have not given up on their president – they still believe his dark claims that the election was ‘‘stolen’’ – but they are feeling decidedly sheepish about their own side’s behaviour. In my corner of Pennsylvania, all the Trump lawn signs that stayed up long after the election have vanished, virtually overnight. They know it is game over.
The ubiquitous ‘‘back the blue’’ signs have gone, too – the creepy black and blue version of the American flag that supposedly denoted support for the forces of law and order but mutated in some hands into a crypto-fascist expression of fealty to Trump.
There were never many Biden signs around here to begin with, but most of them are still standing. The rioters in Washington were a ‘‘bunch of idiots’’, my neighbour told me. ‘‘It’s embarrassing for America.’’
The theme of Biden’s inauguration will be ‘‘America United’’, a deliberate renewal and reconsecration of patriotism. The National Mall will be transformed into a ‘‘field of flags’’ comprising 191,500 American flags and 56 pillars of light.
Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, will inspect the troops at the Capitol, before laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington cemetery with the former presidents Obama,
George W Bush and Bill Clinton (Jimmy Carter, at 96, is unable to attend). The intention is for Trump to be conspicuous by his absence, making use of his voluntary exile to define him as un-American.
Harris’ swearing-in as the first woman and the first black and south Asian to be vice-president will be a moment of pride and celebration for her supporters. Biden is well aware of the great debt he owes to women and black people. Yet it will also be an occasion for alarm in a deserted city filled with soldiers.
Her friend Frederica Wilson, a Florida congresswoman who was in the besieged Capitol building on January 6, said: ‘‘I’m petrified. Her big day, the big day for the nation, a crowning moment for America as she breaks through a thousand glass ceilings . . . [is] going to be shrouded by fear of a white mob of insurgents who are racist and hate-filled. That’s the sad part about this.’’
During the campaign, Harris was already a lightning rod for Republicans – as well as a multiracial symbol of all they perceive to be unacceptably ‘‘woke’’, from support for Black Lives Matter to the Green New Deal.
After this week, she will be in a position of rare power and prominence as the bearer of the casting vote in a Senate divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. It will be up to her to make the most of her new platform without being consumed by partisan warfare.
The Republicans are in no mood for Biden’s message of reconciliation, viewing it as a Trojan horse for left-wing policies. Already, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator who hopes to run for president in 2024, has said there is no chance Biden’s US$1.9 billion stimulus package will pass as planned.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan, announced last week, includes $1400 for most Americans (on top of the existing $600 relief cheques) and help for small businesses and with rent, food and clothing for the neediest.
There will be funds to expand
Covid-19 vaccinations – after a shambolic start to the programme, the target is 100 million vaccinations in the first 100 days of the administration. The president-elect also promised to introduce a $15-anhour minimum wage and ‘‘historic investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, innovation, research and development and clean energy’’.
While Biden’s intended cabinet will be the most diverse in American history, the views of its members are fairly uniform – they all hail from the moderate, centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Many are former Obama staffers.
Yet progressive Democrats are feeling optimistic. The storming of the Capitol and the scale of the coronavirus crisis mark such a radical break with the past they no longer fear it will be the continuity ‘‘Joebama’’ administration, the derisive term for Biden’s team.
Robert Reich, the Berkeley economist and former Clinton labour secretary, who championed Bernie Sanders for president, said: ‘‘Biden has to be bold given where the nation is. The bolder the better. He needs to be a president who talks about national unity but that’s not inconsistent with plans to rebuild the country.’’
In Reich’s view, the pandemicfuelled crisis offers a historic opportunity to lower unemployment and raise wages by investing in ‘‘the economy of the future’’. A K-shaped recovery – benefiting only the rich – would be a political disaster. Ironically, Trump proved ‘‘you can have near-zero interest rates, while revving up the economy with tax cuts’’ without unleashing inflation.
Biden has a chance to take the ‘‘best of Trump’s legacy – the disregard for conventional economic wisdom’’, while persuading bluecollar Trump voters whose wages have stagnated that he is on their side by investing in jobs. ‘‘’Joe Biden has the perfect character to give people the sense that they can rely on him,’’ Reich said.
The same goes for the rest of the world, where Biden’s presidency is expected to usher in a period of calm. Nobody is going to seek to unravel the fledgling Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states – or to return to the ‘‘forever wars’’ of George W Bush and Obama.
Marking a break with Obama – and continuity with Trump – the Biden administration is likely to be hostile to China. However, it will treat it like the former Soviet Union, according to Ellen Laipson, a foreign policy and security expert at George Mason University in Virginia. In the 1980s, arms control negotiations proceeded alongside strategic rivalry.
‘‘The baseline of how we think about the threat posed by China has shifted,’’ she said. ‘‘Under Trump it was almost a showdown – one of us is going to win, the other side is going to lose. Biden’s team are all seasoned internationalists and my perception is that he is even more cautious than they are about the idea that America is the solution for every problem in the world.’’
Joe Biden has to be bold given where the nation is. The bolder the better.’’