Waiting for Joe Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress to begin this week, I observed at New York that Republicans were struggling to define him consistently, which felt like a familiar problem for them:
When Bill Clinton was at the pre-Lewinsky peak of his powers, he drove Republicans nuts. They alternated between accusing him of “stealing our issues” with his triangulating pitches on welfare reform and crime and the size of government, and of being “liberal, liberal, liberal!” — a sort of boomer love child of George McGovern and Janis Joplin in a deceptive deep-fried southern packaging. Eventually the opportunity to depict him as a lying sexual predator solved the conservative dilemma, though you could argue he never stopped throwing them off-balance.
Republicans are similarly having problems getting a clear focus on Joe Biden, as the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman observes:
“Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who has advised Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, [says] that his party’s two main messages about Biden are at odds with each other, blunting their impact. ‘The thing you hear Republicans say most is that he’s too old for the job, which isn’t consistent with saying he’s doing too much,’ Conant said. ‘You can’t effectively argue that he’s incompetent and that he’s too effective.'”
This dual framing of Biden was evident during the 2020 campaign, when Trump called him “Sleepy Joe” and with his usual lack of subtlety suggested his opponent was senile, even as he assailed Biden’s party of radical socialist aims. The 45th president and his surrogates squared the circle by treating Biden as the half-there puppet of the real powers, particularly the “communist” Kamala Harris.
But now, 100 days into the Biden-Harris administration, even though the new president has kept an unusually low profile, there are no signs of Harris or anyone else manipulating him. Indeed, so far his White House has been remarkably free of the factionalism that often undermines clear presidential leadership. With Clinton as president you had a White House staff famously divided (ironically, given the later reputations of the First Lady and the veep) into progressive “Rodhams” and centrist “Gores” who jockeyed for position and placed their varying stamps on administration policies. George W. Bush’s presidency was also marked by competing power centers (e.g., his terrifying vice-president and the “Boy Genius” Karl Rove); to a lesser extent, so was Obama’s. As for Donald Trump, hardly a week passed without someone — particularly his rotating cast of chiefs-of-staff — being described by “insiders” as the real power behind the throne or perhaps as the wild man’s lion-tamer.
Trump, of course, created some of the same problems for Democrats that Clinton — and now Biden — posed for Republicans. Was he the “toddler president” who ran a hollowed-out administration with no real core of convictions or goals? Or was he a putative Il Duce craftily planning an authoritarian takeover of the country? Up until the day he left office there was evidence for both descriptions. Indeed, the coda of his presidency, the January 6 Capitol riot, was variously regarded as a fascist coup attempt and a clown show.
Trump’s successor will have an opportunity in his first address to a joint session of Congress to add to the impression that he is quietly but firmly in charge of the executive branch, and has imposed order on his fractious party as he unveils yet another massive proposal. Kamala Harris will be sitting (and often standing and applauding) behind him, likely looking more like an adoring protégée than any sort of puppet-master. But if he stumbles at all, or looks tired, or says things that supposedly centrist Democrats like him don’t believe, the knees of many elephants will jerk and out will come the mockery of the old man who is a reassuring front for the Marxists actually running the country.
Such confusion if it continues will be of great service to Biden, much like the current Republican tendency to focus on irrelevant culture-war themes while a mostly united Democratic Party enacts legislative initiatives of a magnitude we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies — couldn’t come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now. As Republicans watch Biden’s speech, they should soberly realize that before long it may not matter that much if they bust up the Democratic trifecta in 2022. The damage to GOP policies and priorities wrought by “Uncle Joe” and his “senile socialist regime” could be too large to reverse by then. While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about “cancel culture,” Biden is eating their lunch.
Obama could be fairly criticized for launching competing health care reform messages that create logical inconsistencies. But health care reform isn’t being killed by logic but by gut punches. I would argue that “death panels” burrow into the psyche on many more levels than cost. Uncaring bureaucrats, anti-life liberals, big brother, etc. Obama struggles to keep the public discourse rational while the Republicans, Fox News, and conservative pundits counter with preposterous emotional attacks. The attacks are so provocative that the media just can’t help paying way too much attention. The Obama administration should have been ready with powerful evocative answers. Of course, this isn’t easy — I’m not sitting any fantastic rejoinders. But maybe someone should see if some of Jon Stewart’s writers might like to do a little moonlighting while their boss is on vacation.
Isn’t the problem that Obama said he was focused on cost-controls and, also, that everyone would get to keep what they had, and that we’d insure the uninsured? Seems to me that it was of the administration’s “have-cake-eat-too” argument that raised suspicions. As the post says, I don’t know there was any way to avoid controversy on this difficult issue. But certainly the approach the administration took certainly doesn’t seem to have helped the administration win over the public…
Obama’s message on health care was going to be attacked, and attacked hard, no matter what it was. There is no such thing as an attack-proof health care messsage. Too often, Democrats succumb to something analogous to a “blame the victim” mentality which goes something like this: look how bad they’re attacking you – how dumb could you be! Well, guess what, the Republicans were going to attack no matter how carefully crafted the message. Instead, Obama deserves blame for an ineffective counter-attack. It appears that he, his administration, and the Democratic party were completely unprepared for the Republican’s fire storm of misinformation and distortion. Instead of wailing about the attack they’ve engendered, I wish the Dems would start thinking one (or more) steps ahead. Failing to anticipate the inevitable Republican onslaught is a good way to get beat everytime.