Biden needs a different skill set than he used as a senator

President Joe Biden took office with an immense challenge: How to enact the once-in-a-generation investment programs the country needs, working with what may be the most polarized Congress in our history.

We’ve learned since Inauguration Day that Biden is most effective when he measures his words, negotiates quietly with his former colleagues in Congress, and advances the agenda the country wants. To achieve that, he has held small meetings with nearly 200 House and Senate members over the past five months, according to the White House. Biden makes mistakes when he acts like a senator rather than a disciplined chief executive.

The senatorial Biden was on display last Thursday. He sounded almost giddy in announcing a compromise infrastructure package negotiated with a bipartisan group of 10 senators, touted as a $1.2 trillion deal but with only $579 billion in new money.

In a theatrical exchange later that day with reporters in the East Room, he spoke at times in stage whispers and boasted (accurately but needlessly): “I know the Senate and the House better than most of you know it.”

Biden’s real blunder was that he openly linked the fate of the limited investment package Republicans will support to passage of the broader $1.8 trillion American Families Plan for social investment that progressive Democrats want. “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem,” Biden said of the bipartisan plan he had just endorsed. In making the linkage between the two investment packages explicit, Biden gave away the game.

Republicans were furious that Biden had linked the two. Progressive

Democrats, wary of the slimmed-down compromise, were momentarily appeased. But this balance of anger was reversed two days later when Biden tried to undo his mistake. He conceded that his earlier statement “understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked,” and “also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat ... which was certainly not my intent.”

Biden got into last week’s mess partly because he was trying to reassure the left wing of his party. He doesn’t need to do that, any more than he needs to plead with obstructive Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., didn’t win the presidency in November, and neither did the Republicans. Biden’s strength is that the country seems to want what he’s selling — a government that can stop bickering and pass legislation that matters.

Biden should listen to his own counsel: “My party is divided, but my party is also rational,” he said Thursday, in one of his more sensible comments. “If they can’t get every single thing they want ... are they going to vote ‘no’? I don’t think so.”

What’s ahead is a legislative numbers game, in which every action can produce a counteraction. If Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tries to block the compromise infrastructure bill, for example, moderate Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona may be more likely to embrace the broader reconciliation package. If progressives load that bill with too much spending, Manchin, Sinema and other moderate Democrats may bolt.

Biden’s ability to be an effective political bargainer is crucial, because the stakes are so high. The country is divided, but as we emerge from the pandemic, there’s broad agreement that we are at an “inflection point,” as Brian Deese, head of the National Economic Council, put it during a speech last week to the Atlantic Council. Deese outlined a plan for a new American “industrial policy” to compete with China and for economic and technological strength.

The need to meet the challenge from China may be the best card Biden can play in the negotiations ahead. It’s the one theme on which there seems clear, unambiguous agreement between Republicans and Democrats.

A sign was the Senate’s passage this month, 68 to 32, of a $52 billion plan to invest in the United States’ semiconductor manufacturing industry to compete with Beijing.

Biden’s career has been spent in the glad-handing, backslapping world of the Senate. His brand is passing legislation.

But to achieve that now, he needs the discipline to be presidential.