All eyes on Washington
In the 11 weeks since Election Day, the collision of crises confronting new US President Joe Biden has gone from staggering to almost unimaginable.
More than 170,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 during that stretch alone, sending total US deaths soaring past 400,000. The deep partisan divisions roiling the nation boiled over into violence during the siege of the US Capitol, threatening the nation’s long history of peaceful transitions of power, and resulting in the second impeachment of the outgoing president, Donald Trump.
The US economy has steadily weakened, with employers cutting 140,000 jobs in December alone.
It falls now to Biden to both level with Americans about the deep trouble facing the nation, and to cast ahead to a brighter future. He does so knowing that millions of Americans wrongly believe that his election was illegitimate, fuelled by a lie perpetuated by Trump.
It’s as grim a moment as many Americans can remember – and far from the celebration Biden, 78, likely imagined over the decades he has pined for the presidency.
Historians have put the challenges Biden faces on par with, or even beyond, what confronted Abraham Lincoln when he was inaugurated in 1861 to lead a nation splintering into civil war, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he was sworn in during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933.
But Lincoln and Roosevelt’s presidencies are also a blueprint for the the ways American leaders have turned crises into opportunities, pulling people past the partisan divisions or ideological forces that can halt progress.
‘‘Crises present unique opportunities for large-scale change in a way that an average moment might not,’’ said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. ‘‘The more intense the crisis, the more likely the country is to get behind someone to try to fix that – the concept of uniting in war or uniting against a common threat.’’
Biden will have the narrowest of Democratic majorities in Congress. In the 50-50 Senate, it will fall to Vice-President Kamala Harris to break any ties.
The Republican Party faces an existential crisis of its own making after the Trump era, and it’s deeply uncertain how much cooperating with the new Democratic president fits into its leaders’ plans for their future.
Still, Biden has signalled that he will press Congress aggressively in his opening weeks, challenging lawmakers to pass a US$1.9 trillion (NZ$2.66t) pandemic relief package to address the public health and economic crisis – all but daring Republicans to block him at a moment when cases and deaths across the US are soaring.
Biden’s ability to get that legislation passed will significantly shape both his administration’s ability to tackle the pandemic and his overall standing in Washington.
He’s staked much of the promise of his presidency on his ability to court lawmakers from across the aisle, touting his long working relationship with Republican senators and the reputation he cultivated as a dealmaker while serving as President Barack Obama’s No 2.
But Washington has changed rapidly since then, a reality Biden’s advisers insist he is cleareyed about.
Unlike Obama, he will quickly flex his executive powers on his first day in office, both to roll back Trump administration policies and to take action on the pandemic, including making mask wearing compulsory on federal property.
He has also pledged that his administration will vaccinate 100 million people against the coronavirus within his first 100 days in office, laying down a clear marker to judge his success or failure.