After 50 years in politics, Biden’s timing is perfect

Over a career spanning nearly half a century, with more than his share of stumbles, setbacks and outright failures, there were plenty of reasons to believe that Joe Biden would never reach the Oval Office, let alone do great things with it. But now he may have met his moment.

After so long, Biden finally has perfect timing.

His goal of ending all our partisan division may be beyond him, or any president. But he is still unusually well-positioned to lead the country and manage the government right now. Even many Democrats who supported someone else in the 2020 primaries are starting to believe that Biden is the right president at the right time.

The first reason is what we saw on display in his White House speech Thursday night: Biden works hard to be the most empathetic of politicians, which is exactly what you want at a time of profound national loss. Well over half a million Americans have died from covid-19, and as someone well-acquainted with grief, Biden speaks to the pain of those left behind and the hope that we will reach a future beyond our current hardships.

That allows him to perform the rituals of national leadership – particularly those that require the president to create an emotional connection with the public – with a sincerity that we so sorely missed over the last four years.

“The things we used to do that always filled us with joy have become the things we couldn’t do and broke our hearts,” Biden said on Thursday, and talked about how desperately we want “to talk, to laugh, to hug, to hold one another.” And you knew he meant it.

Second, Biden has an ideological flexibility that has manifested itself in exactly the opposite way from what many in his party feared.

In 2020, many liberal Democrats thought his ambitions were too small, that he wasn’t interested in profound change. They were right that Biden was never an ideological warrior; he has always positioned himself in the center of the Democratic Party, wherever that center happened to be.

But now the pandemic and economic crisis have opened up an enormous opportunity for action, and Biden is taking it – not because he always secretly wanted to expand the welfare state, but because the borders of the possible have shifted. The American Rescue Plan he just signed may be the single most progressive piece of major legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

And after the ideological battles of the 2020 primaries, Biden has enough credibility to make even ambitious policy moves seem like just a reasonable response to the current crisis. The result is that he may produce the kind of progressive change that would have made Elizabeth Warren proud.

Third, Biden is the perfect person to oversee a dramatic expansion in government’s spending and actions – and this is where the arc of his career brought him right to this moment.

Biden wanted to be president for as long as anyone can remember. When he ran in 1988 he came off as glib and callow, his campaign imploding when he lifted parts of a speech from a British politician. Twenty years later he ran again, and his timing couldn’t have been worse: Seeming like a politician of the past, his candidacy was a barely noticeable speed bump on Barack Obama’s drive to the nomination.

But both failures wound up preparing him for where he is now. After the 1988 campaign he returned to the Senate, to keep accumulating the relationships and knowledge of Congress that now give him at least the opportunity to shepherd his legislative agenda. The 2008 campaign convinced Obama that Biden could be the right partner – and he spent the next eight years navigating every corner of the federal government he now oversees.

In particular, one of his first duties – managing the implementation of the 2009 Recovery Act – was a largely unnoticed success. That bill was too small and should have been sold better, but largely because of Biden’s efforts, the government rapidly distributed nearly $800 billion with minimum waste or scandal. That experience now makes him uniquely capable of managing the $1.9 trillion rescue act to maximize its impact.

All of which means that Biden, who felt to many Democrats like a compromise candidate chosen only because he’d be the least offensive to the general electorate, may have been the best choice all along.

He never had the talent of Bill Clinton or Obama, but his presidency could wind up being more consequential than either of theirs.

It’s something every president wants: to not just do a lot of good, but to alter how politics and government work, in ways that reach beyond their four or eight years in office.

Back in March 2008, Obama said that Ronald Reagan had “changed the trajectory of America” and “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Obama didn’t change the trajectory in the way he wanted; in many ways he was constrained by the anti-government paradigm Reagan created. But Biden has broken through it, at least for now.

It’s far too early in Biden’s presidency to know how much change he’ll be able to create. Unanticipated events will occur, things will go wrong, and there will be times of doubt. But at least for now, Biden’s timing is right. Let’s hope he keeps taking advantage of it.

EAST PROVIDENCE (AP) — The East Providence Police Department is launching a body-worn and in-car camera pilot program.

Six members of the department, both patrol officers and supervisors, have volunteered to wear body cameras during a trial period that starts Tuesday, the department said in a statement.

The trial period is expected to last three to four months.

“This program, if fully adopted will create better transparency between the department and the community it serves,” the department said.

The volunteers have been trained how to use and will test equipment from several vendors so they can properly assess the effectiveness of each vendor’s products.

The department also has developed a policy to make sure the cameras are operated in compliance with state law and to address privacy concerns.

Release of video from the cameras will be done in compliance with state law.