More action, less talk define first 100 days
The president has taken on the pandemic, infrastructure problems, climate change, racial justice and more.
>> The card tucked in President Joe Biden’s right jacket pocket must weigh a ton. You can see the weight of it on his face when he digs it out, squints and ever-so-slowly reads aloud the latest tally of COVID-19 dead.
Sometimes he’ll stumble on a digit — after all, flubs come with the man. But the message is always clear: The toll of the virus weighs on him constantly, a millstone that helps explain why the typically garrulous politician with the megawatt smile has often seemed downright dour.
For any new leader, a lingering pandemic that has killed more than a half-million citizens would be plenty for a first 100 days. But it has been far from the sole preoccupation for Biden, 78.
The oldest person ever elected president is tugging the United States in many new directions at once, right down to its foundations — the concrete of its neglected bridges — as well as the racial inequities and partisan poisons tearing at the civil society. Add to that list: a call for dramatic action to combat climate change.
He’s doing it without the abrasive noise of the last president or the charisma of the last two. Biden’s spontaneity, once a hallmark and sometimes a headache, is rarely seen. Some say he is a leader for this time: more action, less talk and something for the history books.
“This has been a really terrible year,” said Matt Delmont, who teaches civil rights history at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “There’s so much. We want a new president to be a light forward. From that perspective, it makes sense that you want to get out of the box fast.”
Biden “sees the virtue of going bigger and bolder,” Delmont said. “It so strongly echoes FDR.”
Few would have bet Joe Biden would ever be uttered in the same breath as Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s too soon to know whether he deserves to be.
But the scope of what Biden wants to do would — if he succeeds — put him in the company of that New Deal president, whose burst of consequential actions set the 100-day marker by which all successors have been informally measured since.
A reported 4,380 people in the U.S. died from the virus on the day Biden became president Jan. 20. COVID-19 is killing about 700 people a day now. For Biden, much of the struggle is about “getting people some peace of mind so they can go to bed at night and not stare at the ceiling.”
It’s not all been smooth. Biden has struggled to change course on immigration practices he railed against in the campaign. He’s earned rare rebukes from some Democrats and shown that a president’s famously empathetic nature does not necessarily mean empathetic treatment of the world’s dispossessed.
The unexpected
Though the West Wing attempted to script the first 100 days, Biden faced vivid reminders that presidents are often measured more by how they respond to events they cannot control.
A surge of mass shootings confronted him, as did a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. The record number of unaccompanied children who tried to cross the border from Mexico — 18,890 in March alone — strained the administration’s capacity to hold them humanely. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are testing him.
Biden was deprived of an orderly transition by Trump’s false claims of election fraud, explosive charges that animated the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and brought a second Trump impeachment trial.
The vaccine
This meant delays up and down the federal bureaucracy. In the case of vaccines, it meant the Trump administration had done little to facilitate their distribution before Biden took office, prompting his complaint in late February about “the mess we inherited.”
A distribution mess, perhaps, but the Trump administration and Congress had made a huge investment in the development of vaccines. Not only that, but the administration took action to lock in early supplies for the U.S. while many other developed countries still face crucial shortages of doses.
As the number of vaccines manufactured swelled, so did the number that reached Americans’ arms, with more than 4 million shots administered one day in mid-April. The president became fond of the political trope of underpromising but overdelivering, repeatedly blowing past benchmarks and timelines.
The improved vaccine deployment was a significant early achievement, in part made possible by Biden’s first legislative success: passing a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill into law within two months.
Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for the measure, though the White House was quick to claim that it was a bipartisan bill because it polled well with GOP voters.
Up in polls
To this point, Republican criticism of Biden has failed to land, as he enjoys healthy poll numbers. A Pew Research approval rating of 59% this month put him in league with Obama (61%) and President George W. Bush (55%). Trump trailed all modern presidents at 39% at this point.
In large measure, Republicans have tried to score points by focusing on wedge issues of the kind that mostly interest Twitter users who argue over racial stereotypes in Dr. Seuss books, gender issues raised by Mr. Potato Head and excesses of cancel culture.
Meanwhile, a longtime Republican argument — we’re spending way too much on government programs — has lost much of its potency, at least for now, thanks to cheap borrowing costs and low inflation.
Biden’s package featured $1,400 payments to most people, on top of $1,800 from Trump’s two waves of pandemic relief, which steered nearly $3 trillion to the economy.
But Biden’s package was much more geared to lower-income Americans and broader in its sweep. It focused on barriers to returning to work and sustaining people as they look for jobs, instead of subsidizing employers. It offers the prospect of slashing poverty by one-third with the stroke of his pen. The aid is to expire; Democrats will try to extend it.