Why Biden as president won’t be predictable
What is very likely is that a Biden presidency won’t be as chaotic as the last four years
In a little less than twoweeks, Joe Biden may be president- elect. If the polls are correct, most voters are ready for a change from the wrecking- ball presidency of Donald Trump. What kind of president will Biden be? Will he be the Old Biden, a blandly moderate Democrat who spent decades in the Senate as an apostle of bipartisan compromise? Or will it be a New Biden, the Democratic nominee whose ambitious, bigspending platform is the most progressive in his party’s history?
Biden has sought to fill both roles at the same time. Since he won the Democratic nomination, he has campaigned mostly as a centrist, reassuring undecided voters that he’s not a socialist, no matter how often Trump says he is. He’s made clear that he doesn’t support calls to “defund” the police, doesn’t endorse progressives’ Green New Deal and won’t ban the oil extraction method known as fracking.
At Thursday’s ABC News town hall event, Biden said his first act as president would be to meet with Republicans in Congress to try to resuscitate the bipartisanship he remembers from his 36 years in the Senate.
“With Trump out of the way ... there’s going to be, I promise you, between four and eight Republican senators that are going to be willing to move,” Biden said, although he didn’t name any. That’s the Old Biden speaking.
Ambitious plans
But look at his position papers and the platform Democrats adopted in August, and a different Biden comes into view: a candidate with plans ambitious enough to draw enthusiastic support from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other progressives who long viewed him with scepticism.
The Biden platform calls for more than $ 4 trillion( Dh14.6 trillion) innewfederal spending. It begins with an immediate stimulus to help the economyweather the Covid- 19 pandemic, then follows with massive proposals to combat climate change, rebuild infrastructure, reduce poverty, subsidise child care and provide universal pre- K education. It’s roughly five times as large as the $ 787 billion stimulus package then- Vice President Biden managed for President Obama after the 2008 election, which followed a financial crash.
Biden and his advisers sometimes compare their proposals to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which transformed and dramatically expanded the federal government during the Great Depression. The sweeping series of proposals reflects a consensus among Democrats that didn’t existwhen Obama and Bidenwere in theWhite House.
“The Democratic Party has moved to the left big time — not because of ideological arguments, but based on the facts of the case,” Biden adviser Jared Bernstein told me. It’s not just a stratagemto unite Democrats for the duration of the campaign. It also reflects a conviction in Biden’s camp — heightened by the pandemic — that the economy needs to be restructured.
That’s where the analogy to FDR comes from: an economic crisis so vast that it not onlydemands federal action but also provides an opportunity for transformative change.
Unoriginal politician
Like Biden, FDRwas considereda charming but unoriginal establishment politician when he was elected in 1932. His campaign proposals to end the Depression were cautious, but the deepening crisis spurred him to do more. FDR had one advantage: huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress that made it easy to pass ambitious legislation.
Howmuch Biden can enact if he is elected will depend heavily on howhis party does in House and Senate elections. Big wins will allow him to claim a mandate for big changes andwill give himmajorities toworkwith.
Hardly anyone but Biden expects the
GOP to go along — and even Biden has said he won’t be surprised if few Republicans cooperate. Republicans won their current majority in the Senate by waging all- out resistance to Obama’s programmes. Any GOP senator who supports Biden’s plans will almost inevitably face a primary challenge from the right.
That won’t be Biden’s only challenge. Democrats, solidly behind him in the campaign, almost surely will disagree over how progressive — and how expensive — their legislation should be.
So Act One of the Biden presidency, if he wins, will be a Democratic battle over how progressive his economic stimulus bill should be.
Act Two will be Biden’s effort to get at least a few Republicans to vote for it.
AndAct Three, if theGOP turns himdown, will be the new president’s battle to pass it over opposition resistance in the Senate.
By promising that his presidency won’t be as chaotic as the last four years, Biden has made bland normality into a virtue.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be fireworks. In all likelihood, his presidency won’t be boring at all.