Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Joe Biden stands on stage after the speech by his vice-presidential pick, Sen. Kamala Harris, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention, August 19, 2020.
Tonight, Joe Biden steps into a spotlight he has dreamed about for his entire adult life, and has been actively pursuing for at least 33 years. On his third try, after eight years as second-in-command, he will accept his party’s nomination for president. He’s been building up to this moment for decades, and has had endless amounts of time to think about the direction in which he wants to take the country. Finally, he alone gets to explain to the public why he deserves the presidency, and what he plans to do if elected.
Other than yanking the office away from a lazy charlatan with fascistic tendencies, however, it’s hard to decipher Biden’s aims. Amid a pandemic where Trump’s active harm has consigned hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths, some believe that deposing him should be enough. But while the media depicts politics as a slightly more urbane form of professional wrestling, it still involves, or is supposed to involve, some governing. What would that look like in a Biden administration?
In May, I wrote a feature on this very question, wondering whether we would get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Biden. Would we get a triangulating dealmaker more preoccupied with bipartisan cooperation, or someone who wishes to transform the nation and fill in the systemic gaps exposed by the coronavirus?
Six hours into a weeklong infomercial about the Democratic Party, that question still hangs in the air. Biden has been presented as a decent man who cares about people. But governing is not a personality contest; it’s a list of policies and a means to get them passed. Biden can offer some clarity tonight, but so far he has kept his options open, straining to maintain unity among the big tent of the anti-Trump coalition. At some point, presidencies are about making choices. Before the hiring process ends, it would be nice to know something, anything, about them.
USUALLY YOU HAVE a decent idea of a president’s goals. The Republican obsession of deregulation and tax cuts has held for 40 years, and in 2016, you knew that Donald Trump would marry that to his primary mission: closing the nation’s borders. Health care was the main topic of the 2008 primary, and the main policy goal of Barack Obama’s presidency, even with a Great Recession to manage. Bill Clinton wanted to fix the economy, stupid, and set out to do that in his first budget bill.
There are certainly presidential candidates who don’t run on a well-formed agenda. They usually don’t win. Hillary Clinton had a filing cabinet of ideas, but her television ads were almost uniformly policy-free, focusing instead on Trump’s character. Biden is headed down a very similar path, egged on by a Lincoln Project approach to politics. But he also reminds me of Jimmy Carter, who similarly tried to be everything to everyone during campaign season. When the details finally got hashed out, he became thoroughly unloved by his party, was nearly ousted in the primary, and failed in re-election.
Biden’s agenda, as unfurled in white papers and past speeches (but not for the national convention audience) doesn’t do enough to defog the mirror. Obviously, 2021, and the next presidency, will be consumed with stopping the pandemic and healing the economy. Biden has used the anodyne phrase “Build Back Better” to describe his desire to make sure the recovery tackles societal inequities and improves society.
We have some details on how that might look. Biden’s four Build Back Better pillars include a serious and important $775 billion commitment to caregiving work, a $700 billion domestic manufacturing plan that emphasizes Buy American federal procurement, and a vague set of policies to help close the racial wealth gap, mainly consisting of setting aside spending on research and development, college affordability, and infrastructure investment in communities of color.
I’ll be clear: If any of that becomes law it would be very positive, and so too with Biden’s labor and affordable-housing policies. But the saga of his commitment to a $2 trillion investment in green infrastructure—a jobs program that would go toward building upgrades, electric-vehicle manufacturing, mass transit like light rail, universal broadband, and clean energy sufficient to get to net-zero emissions by 2035—is perhaps the most instructive here.
Biden can offer some clarity tonight, but so far he has kept his options open, straining to maintain unity among the big tent of the anti-Trump coalition.
That ambitious goal, which has been hailed by environmentalists, has become completely marred this week, after Democrats pulled language out of the party platform vowing to end fossil fuel subsidies. Officials claim that the language was mistakenly added, even though the 2016 platform included this plank, and both Biden and Kamala Harris endorsed canceling fossil fuel subsidies on the campaign trail. Biden policy director Stef Feldman attempted damage control by saying that the candidate “continues to be committed” to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, but if that’s the case, why did it get scrapped from the platform?
In my experience as a former one-term delegate to the California Democratic Party, I think of platforms as a sandbox for activists to play in, while the real business of governing takes place elsewhere. But party officials take this rather seriously, and their directives come from the nominee’s campaign. A deportation moratorium went missing, too; agriculture policy looks to be headed into corporate-friendly confines; and the vaunted public option has barely appeared during the convention, so this is a trend.
Biden also favors a 100,000-strong Public Health Jobs Corps (a proposal that comes right out of the pages of the Prospect) for testing and tracing, as well as a public program of vaccine development and deployment, to tackle the immediate crisis. This level of public works is ambitious in the American context, and a hopeful sign that Biden recognizes the power of government action.
But according to Dylan Matthews, it’s all going to have to be paid for. The Trump tax cuts certainly offer trillions of dollars for this purpose, and Biden’s tax increases are almost entirely focused on the rich, making them an inequality-reducing engine. But in a depressed economy, shifting around money rather than increasing aggregate demand seems unwise.
There are plenty of other plans, tucked away nicely on a splash page to appeal to every Democratic subgroup and coalition. There are big wins for everyone with a D behind their name. If challenged, Team Biden can tell you that your idea is covered, somewhere, six links down on the website. But all this policy has been de-emphasized for the bulk of the campaign, and the convention.
The combination of the deficit hawk vice grip, a totally uncertain response to how to handle the Senate filibuster, and an aim toward finding compromise with an increasingly unhinged Republican Party suggests that it’s been de-emphasized for a reason: Very little of it is going to happen. If Biden thinks he’s walking into politics circa 1983 and can backslap Republicans into action, he’s either going to be sorely disappointed or will go willingly along into deeply unsatisfying deals that the base will reject. Maybe his elevation of anti-Trump Republicans and odes to bipartisanship is just an electoral consideration. But you’d have to ignore 40-plus years of Biden’s history to reach that conclusion.
Congress certainly shouldn’t be an excuse here. There are 277 policies that came out of the Biden-Sanders unity task force recommendations that could be accomplished through executive authority. But when you stand mute on virtually all of them, when the campaign is designed to put off talk of such trivialities as what you would do in office, it’s hard not to get the sense that nothing will fundamentally change.
If challenged, Team Biden can tell you that your idea is covered, somewhere, six links down on the website.
As I mentioned in my feature, a public shattered by the deprivation of the pandemic could demand a response from the political system. You’ve seen this in miniature with the forceful pushback on the slowdown of the U.S. Postal Service, and the continuing protests for racial justice. In the past, outright bad politicians have been prodded by circumstance to rise to the occasion. Biden seems both responsive to these circumstances, and unyielding at the same time.
Progressives claim they will put this dynamic into action. But the convention has shown the limits of this approach. Progressives exude confidence that they can pressure the man they make president, even as he’s spent the run-up to the convention gathering Republicans to tell the nation he won’t make too many drastic changes.
I’m also not certain whether the policy discussion, even on the left, is sufficiently on target. Corporate power is typically far in the background of these discussions; financial policy never broke through in the primaries, and few activists really asked for it.
That brings us to tonight. Biden has struggled throughout the campaign to square his history as a centrist dealmaker with the recent promises to virtually every corner of the liberal coalition. He should reveal his priorities, and explain how he wants to govern. If the details are so superior to Trump’s nasty, corrupt, myopic vision of America, Biden should want to let us in on them.
