After watching Joe Biden’s first White House press conference, I reviewed the transcript the next day and – ignoring commentary in the media – offered some observations. After watching the President’s first address to a joint session of Congress and reading a handful of media accounts, I’ve found some comments that resonate with me.
Let’s begin with critical context offered by David Lauter from Thursday morning’s Los Angeles Times:
I’d say closer to four decades, but otherwise Lauter’s observation nicely sets up Biden’s remarks regarding the economy since the U.S. rejected the post-WWII consensus for the promises of Reaganonmics. President Biden put it plainly:
Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to economic growth in the years to come. It is an eight-year program. These are good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced. Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. Seventy-five percent don’t require an associate’s degree. The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. That’s what it is.
And I recognize something I’ve always said, in this chamber and the other, good guys and women on Wall Street. But Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class. So that’s why I’m calling on Congress to pass the Protect the Right to Organize Act, the PRO Act, and send it to my desk so we can support the right to unionize.
That’s a Democratic agenda, which clearly distinguishes the Democratic Party from the GOP. No Democratic president in decades has said it better, as Joan Walsh suggests:
The longtime establishment Democrat translated progressive ideas Wednesday night—paid family leave, serious police reform, free preschool through community college education, extending generous child tax credits at least through 2025, sizable tax hikes on the wealthy, providing clean water and replacing lead pipes (did I call that progressive? what century is this, anyway?)—into American pragmatism: “These are the investments we make together, as one country, and that only government can make.” Forty years after Ronald Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Democrats mustered their best rejoinder yet.
It’s unsurprising that Democrats who strike themes of economic fairness, including two senators who ran for president, are on board with the Biden agenda, as Peter Dreier notes:
Sanders or Warren could have given Biden’s speech. They would have pushed further — a wealth tax and Medicare for All, for example — but Biden has embraced most of what these two progressive icons proposed during last year’s campaign. But had either of them won the Democratic primary and then the presidency, it is highly doubtful that they could have gotten the traction that Biden has gotten. (I say this as someone who supported Bernie in 2016 and Warren in 2020 and was initially skeptical of Biden.) Paradoxically, Biden is a better messenger for this progressive agenda than Sanders and Warren because he was not viewed as a progressive.
Lisa Lerer and Annie Karni report that even Democrats who hew to the center are all-in:
“We’ve been very happy with his agenda and we’re the moderates,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a Democratic think tank named after a governing style embraced by former President Bill Clinton that rejected liberal orthodoxy. “Some have said this is a liberal wish list. We would argue that he is defining what it is to be a 21st-century moderate Democrat.”
Bennett suggests that the world has changed:
“It’s fair to say that Obama followed the Clinton model, and Biden is not, in some fundamental ways, because the world has changed so profoundly,” Mr. Bennett said. “Joe Biden is dealing with a seditious, anti-democratic set of lunatics. You can’t deal with people who voted to overturn the election. You simply cannot, even if you’re a moderate.”
Of course Matt Bennet doesn’t have a vote in the Senate, as Joe Manchin, Krysten Sinema, and other (perhaps equally hesitant) ‘centrist’ Democrats do. We’ll have to watch and wait over the next few months to see how Biden’s agenda fares.
Senator Tim Scott offered the Republican response to Biden. While relating a personal history unique among GOP senators, Scott offered no more than shopworn GOP criticisms of the Democratic president.
A few lines, early on, accused Biden of being a divisive president:
Last year, under Republican leadership, we passed five bipartisan Covid packages. Congress supported our schools, out hospitals, saved our economy, and funded Operation Warp Speed, delivering vaccines in record time. All five bills got 90 — 90 votes in the Senate. Common sense found common ground.
In February, Republicans told President Biden we wanted to keep working together to finish this fight. But Democrats wanted to go it alone. They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bragged was the most liberal bill in American history. Only 1 percent went to vaccinations. No requirement to reopen schools promptly.
Covid brought Congress together five times. This administration pushed us apart.
These words – from the party that still clings to Donald Trump – are no more credible than the chyrons on Fox News Channel.
Yes, of course Democratic Senators were willing to vote affirmatively on those five bills – even though they gave the Trump administration rare legislative victories during an election year. It was the right thing to do. Contrast this with the malevolent, ruthlessly partisan Senate GOP led by Mitch McConnell, which opposed every significant legislative proposal Barack Obama put forward – regardless of merit, without a glance to principle or to the public interest – simply to deny him a victory. What’s different today? Now there are U.S. Senators, in lockstep with Republicans across the country, who embrace, implicitly or explicitly, the big lie that deems Joe Biden an illegitimate president.
At least they grant that he was born in the U.S.A.