What is Joe Biden thinking? All sides would like to know
I’ve been trying to imagine some kind of strategic vision behind the Biden administration’s recent decision-making — the strange pivot from the stalled-out Build Back Better negotiations to election reform theatrics, in which a president with miserable approval ratings managed to advertise his own political weakness and alienate potential negotiating partners, all in the service of legislation remote from most Americans’ immediate concerns and unlikely to address the genuine problems in the system.
Here is the best theory I can come up with: Biden won in 2020 as the moderate nominee of a partially radicalized party, which created an inherent uncertainty about what his victory would mean for policymaking — whether he would use his centrist cred to push an Elizabeth Warren-style agenda or govern as a bipartisan triangulator, a full moderate.
But after Donald
Trump’s stop-the-steal campaign, the Democratic Senate victories it enabled and the shock of Jan. 6, a lot of Democrats decided that the transformative version was within their grasp. The Republican Party was damaged and internally at war, we had vaccines for the coronavirus that offered the prospect of a quick return to normalcy, and it seemed like the hoped-for “Biden boom” might create space for an ambitious progressive agenda.
This was the atmosphere in which Biden’s expansive proposals earned him comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and in which his first Rooseveltian effort, the recovery bill, passed with ease.
But then came harsh reality: the delta variant, the Afghanistan mess, the inflation spiral. And yet the early progressive expectations for a transformative presidency endured; they were palpable throughout the
Build Back Better negotiations, and they remain evident in the rage against
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Thus the strategic argument for Biden’s recent maneuvers might be that he felt the need to go all the way with the progressive wing of his party, embrace their bombast and actively take their side against Manchin and Sinema — all to prove he had done what he could and the dream is dead for now, the Biden New Deal finished. Only after that knowledge can any sort of pivot to moderation or bipartisanship begin.
As I said, this is the best theory I can come up with. But it’s still not a good justification for Biden’s choices lately — because going all the way with the more ideological faction in your party isn’t costless, and it makes any pivot back to moderation that much harder.
We saw a version of this with the Build Back Better negotiations, where it was always clear Manchin would get to name his price, and by the end his official ask — a smaller bill that did a few things completely, rather than a lot of temporary spending — was entirely reasonable. Yet the White House seemed so committed to taking the progressive side and pushing the West Virginia moderate as hard as possible that it missed the moment to make a deal and instead managed to shove him into opposition.
And in making his push for the never-gonna-happen voting legislation, Biden went with rhetorical maximalism, accusing the legislators preventing its passage of siding with Bull Connor, George Wallace and Jefferson Davis.
Power is what Biden conspicuously lacks right now — which makes what we’ve just watched from him feel like the worst possible combination for a president: an anger that only reveals weakness, an escalation that exposes only impotence beneath.