Biden has one job: Fix the mess that Trump left us
President has accomplished his mission so far by sticking to his base of African American and Latino moderates
President Joe Biden has been in office two weeks, and he’s already catching pressure from both sides.
Progressives want Biden to be bold. Conservatives want Biden to be incremental. But Biden can’t allow narrow interests to pull him off track.
Biden has one job to focus on: Fix a nation that Republicans nearly broke by supporting Donald Trump. Trump left us with a raging pandemic, massive problems at the U.S.Mexico border and racial turmoil so nakedly lopsided that it resulted in the largest protest movement in recorded history.
Based on the moves Biden has been making, it’s clear he knows the only way he’s going to be able to take it all on is by sticking with his base of African American and Latino moderates.
Biden’s time in office so far has been marked by executive orders aimed at improving health care, making immigration policy more inclusive, and rooting out systemic racism in criminal justice, housing and federal government.
These are smart moves to follow through on campaign promises, and it could be that they’re the core of a sound coalition-building strategy that will help him attack COVID-19 both as a public health crisis and as an economic disaster.
Biden has to slow the rates of infections and deaths, and he has to reverse the negative economic effects of a pandemic that put millions of Americans out of work and dented the paychecks of tens of millions more.
The Biden administration has gotten behind a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, that’s already creating controversy over its size and prompting political observers to question whether Democrats will be able to squeeze it through their narrow advantage in the U.S. Senate.
It can happen, but to pull it off, Joe Biden and his allies are going to have to resist pressure from the left and right in order to make an aggressive play from the center of the board.
There are liberals looking at Biden’s executive orders piecemeal and saying he isn’t pushing far enough on one item or another.
They’re saying his health care expansion needs to come with more subsidies or that the only system they’ll accept is a universal model that comes with no cost to individual patients.
And those might be good, altruistic goals, but they’re exactly why Bernie Sanders isn’t president today. The harder you push, the more resistance you meet.
President Barack Obama used to say, “you can’t let perfect become the enemy of good.” Biden is using that message to expand Affordable Care Act coverage, opening a special enrollment period starting next month. And he’s planning to advertise the expansion heavily.
Conservatives, meantime, are going to attack Biden’s border strategy, saying he’s opening the system too fast by creating a new citizenship pathway for about 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
Biden should sit back and allow them to play the music of their own political funerals. If Biden’s plan works and these people are voting citizens in five years, they’re going to support the Democratic Party, and so will their family members and political allies — probably for generations.
The Republican Party, as we know it, will never be able to recover in Southwestern states with heavy immigrant populations such as Arizona and Nevada, and such a result could tip Texas toward Democrats in national and state elections.
As for his racial-equity agenda, Biden is going to never going to please everyone. The “abolish the police” crowd won’t be satisfied by anything short of a revolution. And progressives such as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will always push for more.
“This is a development and an important step,” she said on Twitter. “There’s more to be done to end the for-profit caging of people in the U.S. We must include ending for-profit immigrant detention and examine the use of for-profit services that squeeze families of the incarcerated public prison, too.”
The conservative opposition, meantime, is targeting decisions such as Biden’s move to get rid of the 1776 Commission, which had been put in place to downplay the racism inherent in the founding of our nation.
The conservative National Review called the commission “a welcome initiative,” adding that Biden’s move to do away with it “is another sign of how desperately we need voices to combat what is rapidly becoming the new orthodoxy about American history.”
It’s up to Biden to ignore all of this in pursuit of the larger goal.
Health care doesn’t matter if no one can get into hospitals because they’re choked off by COVID-19 cases.
Immigration policy doesn’t matter if people are dying and factories are closing because of COVID-19 outbreaks.
And racial equity can’t be achieved until Black and brown people stop dying at severely disproportionate rates from COVID-19.
Biden’s got to use whatever political influence he has — and right now, he’s got a lot — to get support for the main segments of his American Rescue Plan.
Biden is off to a good start by following through on campaign promises to key demographics that put him in office, but as we learn more about the plan, the pressure from the left and right is only going to increase.
He’s going to have to stick with his moderate base and remember he has one job.
Biden was elected to clean up after Donald Trump — and there was no bigger mess left behind than Trump’s coronavirus response.