Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Sunday.
Like the world according to T.S. Eliot, it ended with a whimper. Which is about the best progressives could have hoped for, given Republicans’ control of the House and the president’s limited ability to transcend that unfortunate state of affairs with some powerful messaging.
This is not a president who does—who can do—powerful messaging.
Joe Biden’s strengths and weaknesses are those of a workhorse senator. He can deal. He can keep lines of communication open to his fellow pols. He can’t use the powers of speech to reframe a debate or lift it to a higher level where his position becomes the obvious solution.
Had he been so able, he might have gone on television to tell the nation why the very existence of the debt ceiling was an affront to both the Constitution and the nation’s standing. He would have laid out the reasons why he was inviting the Court to rule on it.
But in his 50 years in the public eye, Biden has never delivered a speech with the power to alter the public’s understanding of a major issue. That wasn’t really a problem when he was a senator or even a vice president. It is, however, a genuinely limiting factor on his de facto powers as president.
Speeches matter. In elevating the purpose of the war the North was waging, the Gettysburg Address justified the unprecedented casualties its soldiers were taking to a grieving and shell-shocked nation. Lyndon Johnson was never able to deliver such a speech during the Vietnam War (justifying that war was beyond all rhetorical powers), but even LBJ, who was anything but silver-tongued, delivered one great speech, which spurred the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.
But speeches can be overvalued, too. Barack Obama’s presidency received more praise than it probably merited, in part because he was so eloquent a speaker for morally necessary causes. But the deal that Biden salvaged from the debt ceiling negotiations was so superior to that which Obama hobbled away with from his own negotiations in 2011 that it makes clear there’s more to a presidency than speechifying.
Once the Republicans resolved to inflict the debt ceiling hostage-taking upon us, it was a given that Biden would go through with the requisite haggling. Reframing the question by challenging its constitutionality or minting a gazillion-dollar platinum coin would have required the kind of redefinitional sales job that Biden’s aides, and perhaps Biden himself, knew he couldn’t pull off.
What he can enter into (a lot better than Donald Trump ever could) is the art of the deal. The concessions that Biden made are not only much less damaging than those of the 2011 arrangement—which ensured that the recovery from the 2008 crash would take a full decade—but might provide some political advantages in battles yet to come. Consider, for instance, one of the deal’s most egregious provisions, which my colleague David Dayen has termed the Pipeline Payoff. By ensuring that Joe Manchin’s pet pipeline is completed, now magically empowered to leap all remaining judicial and agency reviews in a single bound, Biden strengthens Manchin’s prospects for re-election next year, which the Democrats need if they’re to retain control of the Senate. He also lessens the prospect that Manchin will wage an independent presidential candidacy on the No Labels line, which would almost surely boost Republicans’ chances to win that election. For that matter, he makes it harder for No Labels to pretend that he’s a dangerous leftist who must be replaced. And, of course, he avoids the biggest obstacle to his own re-election, which was the economic implosion that would have followed a default, remote though the chance of an actual default actually was.
This is not to say that Biden’s deal making didn’t come with a cost. From my perspective, its greatest cost was the omission of any permitting deal that would have sped the construction of electric transmission lines, absent which it could be a very long time before wind and solar power can light up distant cities and farms. That task now falls to a better Congress than the one we have now.
He can’t speak but he can deal. As presidents go, we’ve done better, and we’ve done lots, LOTS worse.
