After reading a few days worth of carping about Joe Biden’s performance, I decided enough’s enough and responded at New York:
Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 43 days. He inherited power from a predecessor who was trying to overturn the 2020 election results via insurrection just two weeks before Inaugural Day, and whose appointees refused the kind of routine transition cooperation other administrations took for granted. His party has a four-vote margin of control in the House, and only controls the Senate via the vice presidential tie-breaking vote (along with a power-sharing arrangement with Republicans). Democratic control of the Senate was not assured until the wee hours of January 6 when the results of the Georgia runoff were clear. Biden took office in the midst of a COVID-19 winter surge, a national crisis over vaccine distribution, and flagging economic indicators.
Biden named all his major appointees well before taking office, and as recommended by every expert, pushed for early confirmation of his national security team, which he quickly secured. After some preliminary discussions with Republicans that demonstrated no real possibility of GOP support for anything like the emergency $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus package he had promised, and noting the votes weren’t there in the Senate for significant filibuster reform, Biden took the only avenue open to him. He instructed his congressional allies to pursue the budget reconciliation vehicle to enact his COVID package, with the goal of enacting it by mid-March, when federal supplemental unemployment insurance would run out. Going the reconciliation route meant exposing the package to scrutiny by the Senate parliamentarian, It also virtually guaranteed total opposition from congressional Republicans, which in turn meant Senate Democratic unanimity would be essential.
The House passed the massive and complex reconciliation bill on February 27, right on schedule, with just two Democratic defections, around the same time as the Senate parliamentarian, to no one’s great surprise, deemed a $15 minimum wage provision (already opposed by two Senate Democrats) out of bounds for reconciliation. The Senate is moving ahead with a modified reconciliation bill, and the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet is chugging ahead slowly but steadily. Like every recent president, he’s had to withdraw at least one nominee – in his case Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget, though the administration’s pick for deputy OMB director is winning bipartisan praise and may be substituted smoothly for Tanden.
Add in his efforts to goose vaccine distribution — which has more than doubled since he took office — and any fair assessment of Biden’s first 43 days should be very positive. But the man is currently being beset by criticism from multiple directions. Republicans, of course, have united in denouncing Biden’s refusal to surrender his agenda in order to secure bipartisan “unity” as a sign that he’s indeed the radical socialist – or perhaps the stooge of radical socialists – that Donald Trump always said he was. Progressives are incensed by what happened on the minimum wage, though it was very predictable. And media critics are treating his confirmation record as a rolling disaster rather than a mild annoyance, given the context of a federal executive branch that was all but running itself for much of the last four years.
To be clear, I found fault with Biden’s presidential candidacy early and often. I didn’t vote for him in California’s 2020 primary. I worried a lot about Biden’s fetish for bipartisanship. I support a $15 minimum wage, and as a former Senate employee, have minimal respect for the upper chamber’s self-important traditions. But c’mon: what, specifically, is the alternative path he could have pursued the last 43 days? Republican criticism is not worthy of any serious attention: the GOP is playing the same old tapes it recorded in 2009 when Barack Obama (and his sidekick Biden) spent far too much time chasing Republican senators around Washington in search of compromises they never intended to make. While they are entitled to oppose Biden’s agenda, they are not entitled to kill it.
Progressive criticism of Biden feels formulaic. Years and years of investment in the rhetoric of the eternal “fight” and the belief that outrage shapes outcomes in politics and government have led to the habit of seeing anything other than total subscription to the left’s views as a sell-out. Yes, Kamala Harris could theoretically overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue, but to what end? So long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose the $15 minimum wage, any Harris power play could easily be countered by a successful Republican amendment to strike the language in question, and perhaps other items as well. And if the idea is to play chicken with dissident Democrats over the fate of the entire reconciliation bill, is a $15 minimum wage really worth risking a $1.9 trillion package absolutely stuffed with subsidies for struggling low-income Americans? Are Fight for 15 hardliners perhaps conflating ends and means here?
Media carping about Biden’s legislative record so far is frankly just ridiculous. Presumably writing about the obscure and complicated details of reconciliation bills is hard and unexciting work that readers may find uninteresting, while treating Tanden’s travails as an existential crisis for the Biden administration provides drama, but isn’t at all true. The reality is that Biden’s Cabinet nominees are rolling through the Senate with strong confirmation votes (all but one received at least 64 votes), despite a steadily more partisan atmosphere for confirmations in recent presidencies. The COVID-19 bill is actually getting through Congress at a breakneck pace despite its unprecedented size and complexity. Trump’s first reconciliation bill (which was principally aimed at repealing Obamacare) didn’t pass the House until May 4, 2017, and never got through the Senate. Yes, Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress in February 2009, but it was less than half the size, much simpler, and more to the point, there were 59 Senate Democrats in office when it passed, which meant he didn’t even have to use reconciliation.
There’s really no exact precedent for Biden’s situation, particularly given the atmosphere of partisanship in Washington and the whole country right now, and the narrow window he and his party possess – in terms of political capital and time – to get important things done. He should not be judged on any one legislative provision or any one Cabinet nomination. So far the wins far outweigh the losses and omissions. Give the 46th president a break.
Clinton supporters endorse pragmatism. The Internet far left believes in idealism. Past events and present arguments are just symbols of the division in the basic world views of the factions.
A challenge to a person’s world view is an attack on everything that person is and believes in. Anger results.
There is great hostility between the factions now. The primaries aren’t going to settle it. If Democrats are to survive as a party the factions must be able to form temporary truces.
In my organizing work, I think Democrats feel betrayed by Bill Clinton. He promised a “third way” and then had Mickey Cantor drag us into NAFTA and GATT and more globalization. When polled between 55-60% of Americans opposed NAFTA and increasing globalization of our economy.
John Edward’s public criticism of corporate dominated Washington rings true for many. And a lot of us don’t want to have to relive the rancor and negativity of the Clinton 1990s. This election is about facing the future, not regurgitating the past.
And what is HRC doing? She has appointed Joy Philippi, past President of the National Pork Producers, as co-Chair of Rural Americans for Hillary. The NPC represents global, industrial agri- businesses in a time when many, many Americans hunger for a local, healthy food system built on humane and ecologically smart principles. Joy Philippi is strong evidence that HRC does not have a clue about what is happening on the ground in America’s communities with regard to food.
Food, its contribution to health and community, is a concrete reality, a topic that everyone has some feelings about.
Our nation is in the middle of a local food revolution (fueled by lack of confidence in food from abroad). HRC, indeed, virtually all the candidates are silent about this strong grassroots movement. This is a very big mistake.
Whatever the future of the Democratic Party and our nation, I don’t think another corporate centrist that talks “free markets” while increasing subsidies to dysfunctional corporate enterprises like hog production and ethanol is the answer.
Bill McDonough says, “if you want to go to Canada, but are heading toward Mexico at 100mph an hour. It doesn’t really help to slow down to 30. You are still going the wrong direction.”
HRC doesn’t evidence any understanding of where history and the living Earth’s environment is taking us. We need to turn around and go in the right direction.
What Bai calls Clintonism is nothing more than smart liberalism, constrained by the art of the possible. Traditional liberalism came to embrace a lot of dumb, bad policies, the faults of which experience and a better understanding of psychology, sociology, and economics have clarified. Clinton rejected the most obvious of those bad policies. He could not implement major replacement programs, however, because of the political climate he faced, a climate partly engendered by the old-line lefties whose advocacy for those stupid policies helped poison it.
The Clinton Referendum merely points out that at bottom the primaries are about whether Democrats want to side step Constitutional term limits and re-elect Bill Clinton (with Hillary as the front man).
The question is, is it even good and proper for Democrats (and the country) to be asked to revisit the Clinton Presidency in this way?
I think legacy presidencies are a bad idea to begin with (a la Bush) for many reasons. But here Bill Clinton has completely withdrawn his role a past president in order to play cut throat partisan politics. Which says a lot about who he really is and was. And in the end, there will be a referendum, not just on his presidency, but on them personally. No more Clintons. Enough!