Bridging political divide is Biden’s biggest challenge
When 20 Democratic presidential candidates over two nights in June 2019 participated in the party’s first debate of the election season, none had an inkling of what the eventual winner would face.
From the start, former Vice President Joe Biden was the front-runner. But no one could have imagined the confluence of crises he would face when he takes the oath of office on Wednesday to become the 46th president of the United States.
Today, more than ever, what the country needs is someone who can show empathy, lean on experience to calm national anxiety, work to unite us and solve our key issues. Biden, 78, might prove to be exactly the right person for the moment.
A pandemic has already taken 400,000 lives in the United States, by far the worst total in the world, in a country that was supposed to have been the best prepared for such a deadly outbreak. Nearly a year into the response, daily deaths are at their highest levels with forecasts of another 100,000 by the end of February as a new, more-contagious strain takes hold. Meanwhile, vaccines were developed in record time, but their distribution has been hindered by chaos at the national, state and local levels.
Many parts of the economy lie in tatters even though, and because, national and state leaders prioritized reopening businesses over confronting the coronavirus. Unemployment, which surged at the onset of the pandemic and was slowly declining since, is once again on the rise while millions of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage and cover their other bills.
Yet, the fight against COVID-19 has been so politicized by the outgoing president that more than a quarter of Americans, and nearly half of Republicans, still don’t wear a mask when they leave their home and expect to be near others.
The nation is so divided that a third of those surveyed, and nearly two-thirds of Republicans, after an onslaught of lies by President Donald Trump and his supporters, incorrectly believe that Biden is not the rightful winner of the election. Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the election results.
Most of the country is raw with anger and anxiety after Trump, who refuses to concede, encouraged a Capitol insurrection that threatened our democracy and our elected representatives, and left five dead.
So much has changed since that Democratic debate nearly 19 months ago — the debate in which Sen. Kamala Harris tried to score political points by attacking front-runner Biden for his nearly four-decade-old votes against school busing.
At the time of the debate, Trump had not even placed his now-infamous call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seeking political favors in exchange for taxpayerfunded international aid — the call that led to the first impeachment trial. Back then, it was almost unimaginable that Trump would become the first president to be impeached twice.
Throughout the primary and general elections, Biden was never close to being the flashiest candidate. For most Democrats, he wasn’t their first pick, but, as Trump sensed better than many, Biden presented the biggest election threat. He was steady, experienced and politically moderate — someone with a history of working in a bipartisan fashion.
But the challenges in this political climate will be daunting.
Biden and Harris, the Bay Area native about to become the nation’s first woman and first woman of color vice president, are certainly mindful of the thin thread by which their party controls the legislative process in Washington. We’ve just seen in the House races what happens when voters perceive that Democrats overplayed their hands.
Biden is correct when he says that voters who backed him want action. Indeed, the nation deserves a competent federal distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, a job-producing program to rebuild the nation’s economy and infrastructure, a serious plan to address climate change, affordable health care with a public option, long-overdue immigration reform and reestablishment of the United States as a respected global leader.
But the key to passing reforms, and politically sustaining that change beyond the next election cycle, lies in bringing along at least some of the disaffected Trump voters — rather than trying to run them over.
Biden knows that while he won the Electoral College, it was only because he captured five swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — each by less than 1.2 percentage points. And while Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes, Trump in losing garnered more votes than any winning president had previously received.
While the nation has been upended since 2019, the political divisions remain and are perhaps deeper than ever before. Bridging that gap will be Biden’s biggest challenge.