John Minchillo/AP Photo
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden stand on stage before a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN and The New York Times at Otterbein University, October 15, 2019, in Westerville, Ohio.
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait delivered a three-barreled salvo in his column last week. There was one part on why Barack Obama’s presidency was superior to Joe Biden’s; a second part on why the progressivism of Biden’s presidency was a cul-de-sac for Democrats that should largely be eschewed; and a third part, implicit in the second, that warned Kamala Harris not to emulate Biden’s economic policies as she campaigns and, should she win, as she governs.
Chait begins by blaming the Democrats’ unsustainable leftism on the liberal elite’s war on neoliberalism. He traces it to the Hewlett Foundation, which funded a host of think tanks and magazines (including, periodically, this one) that have repudiated neoliberalism and argued that the American economy had grown so grotesquely unequal that measures that the Democrats had previously either shunned (like junking free trade) or embraced only sporadically (like financial regulation) were now necessary.
He is particularly vexed by what he sees as Biden’s inexplicable catering to the party’s left. “[F]lush with victory over his more progressive rivals, Biden made a peculiar decision,” Chait writes. “Rather than pivot to the center, as nominees traditionally do, he instead pivoted away from it. Biden agreed to a ‘unity task force’ to adjust his platform in the direction of Warren and Sanders.” Worse yet: “He proceeded to staff his administration with officials loyal to Warren and Sanders.” One arguing in good faith might here concede that Biden won the presidency with this approach.
Chait’s initial focus is on the racial and cultural leftism that Biden’s kowtowing to Bernie and Liz presumably entailed, but anyone who’s ever listened to the two New England senators knows that their focus is overwhelmingly on economic policy. Not surprisingly, then, the Sanders/Warren-influenced staffing decisions that Chait laments (without actually identifying them) were chiefly to economic posts and regulatory agencies: the U.S. trade representative, the Labor Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, and so on.
Chait doesn’t trouble himself to say which of the actions that these lefties are promoting amount to bad policy and are politically damaging to boot. The push to regulate cryptocurrencies? The lawsuits to break up the monopolies that stifle competition? The move to enable the 20 percent of American workers who are bound by noncompete agreements that keep them from seeking different jobs? The efforts to enable workers to join unions without fear of being fired? The enforcement of trade laws preventing sham Mexican unions? The ruling that companies that break U.S. labor laws during union elections must then recognize the union? None of this, and in fact no action outside of legislation—which Congress drives as much as the president—is mentioned at all. Without getting into, or even near, specifics, Chait sees unnamed, undiscussed Biden officials’ tenures as something to be repudiated.
Biden’s purportedly inexplicable embrace of more progressive economics was in large part a matter of positioning himself in the middle of his party.
“Why Biden chose to conduct his victory like a surrender,” Chait opines, “has never been fully articulated.” Rather than progressive perspectives trickling down from Hewlett, however, I think it might have something to do with Sanders’s having won roughly ten million votes in the 2016 primaries, as well as several states in the early 2020 primary before Biden and COVID both emerged victorious. It might have something to do with the fact that Sanders was the clear preference of young Democrats. The outpouring of support that Sanders received from millennials in the middle of the last decade came as a surprise not just to the party establishment but also to the party’s left, to all those academics and think-tankers who may have been socialists or social democrats themselves but had never had the slightest notion that their beliefs could or would find a foothold in mainstream politics. It came as a surprise to Sanders himself.
It shouldn’t have. Millennials were the left-behind generation in the tortuously slow recovery from the 2008 crash. Unemployment remained elevated until the closing years of Obama’s presidency. Key sectors of the economy—education, state and local government, construction—took a decade to regain their footing. The Great Recession, like the Great Depression, convinced many young people that letting the markets run the show was no way to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. This was a conclusion they reached without receiving funding from Hewlett or being influenced by left-leaning publications, all of which had been stunned by the level of Sanders’s support. I’d like to say the Prospect had that kind of power. Alas, we don’t.
With polling showing that the share of Democrats identifying themselves as liberal had significantly increased over the levels seen during the Clinton and Obama presidencies, particularly on economic matters, Biden’s purportedly inexplicable embrace of more progressive economics was in large part a matter of positioning himself in the middle of his party. It was the middle of his party that had moved left, and Biden, ever the party man, followed.
To say this didn’t work out politically ignores that under Biden, Democrats battled to a draw in the 2022 midterms, while Democrats were completely wiped out during the Obama years in all races other than Obama’s own, losing hundreds of legislative seats.
Chait takes pains to extol Obama’s achievements and diminish Biden’s. He argues that the left often blames Obama for not doing more to stimulate the economy, when it was really congressional Republicans who were the roadblock after they took control of Congress in the 2010 elections. In this, Chait is clearly correct. But he then argues that Biden’s legislative achievements were meager, historically speaking. “Unlike Obama, or even Bill Clinton,” Chait writes, “Biden failed to secure any permanent expansions of the safety net. His ambitious plans to create a new child tax credit, universal child care, and prekindergarten collapsed.”
With this argument, however, Chait makes the very same error for which he calls out the left when it blames Obama instead of the Republicans for not passing more economic stimulus measures. Chait completely neglects the fact that while Obama had a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate for part of his first two years as president, and 59 votes for most of it, Biden had exactly 50 Democratic senators in his own first two years, which is why he couldn’t get Build Back Better through Congress in full. (Clinton, incidentally, started his first two years in 1993 with 57 Democratic senators.) Just as Biden couldn’t win any Republican support for much of his agenda, neither could Obama, I hasten to point out, get any Republicans to vote for the Affordable Care Act. It passed only because he got just enough Democrats to vote for it (or rather, Nancy Pelosi got just enough Democrats).
In this, Chait comes close to giving double standards a bad name.
I should add that by complaining that Biden’s programs were too far left and that he failed to get them enacted, Chait calls to mind the Woody Allen joke about a disconsolate tourist at a Catskills resort. “The food is terrible,” the tourist says. “And such small portions!”
LIKE CHAIT, I’M CERTAINLY AN OBAMA ADMIRER, but not all of the economic shortcomings of his tenure in office can be blamed on the Republicans. His Republican Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and attorney general Eric Holder did nothing to stop the epidemic of repossessions that led to ten million families losing their homes, despite having $75 billion already appropriated for foreclosure mitigation, not to mention massive leverage to get equitable relief from banks that had repossessed homes in patently illegal fashion.
Geithner also approved the outrageous paydays to the heads of the very banks whose misconduct had precipitated the crash. And Obama himself persisted in campaigning for the corporate wish list of a Pacific Rim free-trade agreement, even as Hillary Clinton was being clobbered by Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign for the trade accords with Mexico and China that her husband had campaigned for and then signed into law.
Chait complains that labeling Obama as a neoliberal elides the huge distinctions between him (and Bill Clinton) and their Republican rivals. On a number of issues, such as health insurance, Chait is clearly right. But on the issue of support for globalized trade—and its necessary concomitant, the preservation or revitalization of domestic industry—there’s a through line that runs straight from Reagan through Obama. Financial deregulation also proceeded straight from Reagan to the 2008 financial collapse, whereupon Obama did move to rein it in somewhat, though Geithner was far more solicitous to Wall Street than he was to homeowners. The idea Chait proposes that bank stress tests are somehow akin to New Deal–era programs to leash finance is preposterous on its face.
Perhaps the clearest departure that Biden made from the experience of the Obama presidency was the lesson he took from Obama’s inability to persuade Congress (then in Republican hands) to re-up the 2009 stimulus. Biden avoided this pitfall, and the prolonged economic stagnation that it all but guaranteed, through a 2021 COVID-era stimulus of a size that ensured the economic recovery from the pandemic collapse would be both swift and far-reaching: exactly what the recovery from the 2008 collapse was not.
Chait parrots a line that Obama actually did get a second stimulus through in small chunks throughout 2009 and 2010, but he’s referring to things like extending unemployment benefits, which were particularly vital only because the initial stimulus was so inadequate.
Despite all this, Chait warns Vice President Harris to disenthrall herself from the perils of Bidenomics. He cites as an example of what she should not do an article by Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar that counseled Harris that she “needs to reaffirm her commitment to the core principles of Bidenomics.” By this, Foroohar clearly meant the administration’s pro-union and antitrust policies, its commitment to domestic industrial policy that has unleashed a stunning boom in manufacturing construction, its support for a family policy that includes a larger Child Tax Credit and affordable child care, as well as free public colleges. It’s policies such as these, as historian Michael Kazin has documented in What It Took to Win, his history of the Democratic Party, that have historically resulted in Democratic victory at the polls. Undaunted, Chait urges Harris to steer clear of such crazy notions.
MY ONLY IN-PERSON EXPOSURE TO CHAIT, a former assistant editor at the Prospect whose tenure didn’t overlap with mine, came at a debate the Prospect sponsored on the eve of the Iraq War. Speaking against our imminent invasion of Iraq were my colleague Bob Kuttner and William Galston, the leading intellectual champion of more centrist Democratic policies. Speaking for it were Chait and, probably since Chait’s performance was so memorable, I can’t call to mind his partner.
What was so memorable about Chait’s performance was his almost taunting proclamation that not only were there vast storehouses of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that those of us who opposed the war would be humiliated and disgraced when those weapons were found, as they surely would be.
I note that one thing Chait neglects to credit Obama for in his piece last week is Obama’s opposition, right from the get-go, to the Iraq War. It was precisely his opposition that was the chief point of differentiation in the 2008 Democratic primaries between Obama and Hillary Clinton, who’d voted to authorize the war when it had come before the Senate. Had Chait been around to counsel Obama during the lead-up to the war, and had Obama taken his advice, it’s not likely that there’d be an Obama presidential legacy at all.
I mention this only so Kamala can put Chait’s current counsel in perspective.
