Biden presidency: return to ‘normal’ belies an audacious agenda
“Just imagine,” tweeted Pete Buttigieg last October, “turning on the TV, seeing your president, and feeling your blood pressure go down instead of up.”
Joe Biden’s first hundred days in the White House appear to have been successful in lowering the nation’s blood pressure after a four-year white knuckle ride with Donald Trump.
Americans no longer dread awakening to all caps tweets that run the gamut from threatening war to insulting some celebrity’s looks. Journalists express gratitude for getting their weekends back. Cable news has returned to its old drumbeat of hurricanes, mass shootings and the British royal family soap opera.
It is evidence that Biden has adopted a get-out-of-the-way approach, returning to the stylistic norms of Trump’s predecessors and an era when citizens did not have to think about their president all day every day. The mood change in Washington is tangible.
“I found myself for the last four years waking up in the morning and feeling quite happy and then this dark cloud would come over my head and I’d think: something’s wrong,” recalled Sally Quinn, an author and journalist. “And then I would think, Donald Trump got elected president! My God. That’s gone now and honestly, it’s like it never happened.
“I look back on what went on and how we were all just filled with a constant anxiety and upset and disruption and chaos and anger and outrage and everything else. Everybody I know is just calmer and, of course, Biden comes at the same time that we’ve got the [coronavirus] vaccine and summer is coming. It’s such a different environment now. It’s so peaceful.”
Trump’s vice-like grip on the nation’s consciousness quickly began to fade after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter following the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. He now releases email statements from his “45 Office”, sometimes in the style of a tweet, but most of them drift harmlessly into the ether.
His interviews on Fox News and other conservative media have a similarly modest impact. An analysis by the Washington Post found that in March 2021, “Google search interest [in Trump] was lower than at any point since June 2015, as was the amount of time he was seen on cable.
“The networks were covering him far less, down to the point reached last year when the pandemic overtook Trump in the national attention. Besides that, the average mentions of Trump in March were back to the levels seen in November 2015.”
But this is not because Biden has emulated the shock and awe tactics that gave Trump the constant media attention he craved. The Democrat has given only one solo press conference and indulges less “chopper talk” with reporters before boarding Marine One on the White House south lawn. His press secretary, Jen Psaki, avoids the banana skins that felled her predecessors so her live briefings are seldom shown on cable news.
Whereas the Trump White House produced almost nightly revelations of palace intrigue or the latest twist in the Russia investigation, Biden’s version is proving stubbornly leakproof. There has even been mental space for “dog bites man” stories involving the president’s German Shepherds, Champ and Major.
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “President Trump was in our faces 24/7 and Joe Biden, if anything, has moved closer to the other end of the spectrum.
“He and his team appear to have decided that when it comes to presidential visibility less is more, that if presidential appearances are reserved for events of significance, whether they’re speeches, press conferences, comments on important issues or important meetings, that’s just fine. There are real advantages to not being the focal point of everything.”
Although Biden is similarly unspectacular on Twitter, his chief of staff, Ron Klain, is a feistier presence. Klain frequently tweets updates on vaccination progress and other accomplishments of the administration, and is not averse to retweeting spiky posts about Republicans or whatever is the talk of Washington that day.
Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, said: “It’s unusual but, in a way, it’s a perfect bully pulpit for Klain, a combination of cheerleading and agenda setting that seems to work for him.
“The White House chief traditionally tries to keep everybody in the administration on the same page and I think this may be one way to do it. Everybody knows what his priorities are at any given moment of the day, whenever he’s tweeting. He’s able to advance Joe Biden’s agenda by cheerleading and also keeping everybody in line. It seems to work for him.”
A return to “normal” is not inherently a positive. There is a school of thought that the political status quo was what got America into trouble in the first place, giving rise to an outsider like Trump who promised to smash the system. But analysts point to a difference between Biden’s style and substance.
His quiet, almost boring approach belies an audacious agenda that has earned comparisons with with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ezra Klein, a columnist for the New York Times, argues that dialing down the conflict allows Biden to dial up the policy: “Speak softly and pass a big agenda.”
Or to put it another way, whereas Trump’s sound and fury may have signified not very much, Biden’s near disappearing act could ultimately allow him to be far more consequential.
Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, added: “This feels a lot more normal. In many respects, it’s an administration whose mores we can recognize, whether we celebrate them or not. But the administration is not normal in the way that perhaps counts the most: namely, in its policy ambition.”
Trump is not necessarily gone for good. He continues to exert huge influence over the Republican party and could soon return to the political stage, campaigning during the 2022 midterm elections and perhaps even for the White House in 2024. But for now, many of those whose dreams he haunted are enjoying a new dawn.
Moe Vela, who was a senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “It’s the biggest sigh of relief in the sense that my stress levels are reduced dramatically because I don’t have to go and read about what that idiot was tweeting or what damage did he do today.
“I don’t think that we, as the majority of Americans that voted for Joe Biden, realised just how much that was stressful emotionally, mentally and spiritually. I feel like a tremendous burden has been lifted off my shoulders and my heart. There’s a feeling that somehow everything’s going to be OK with Joe Biden there, and that was the absolute antithesis of what I felt under Donald Trump.”