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.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
ducdebrabant:
Thanks for this perceptive comment. It helped remind me that Gerson wasn’t complaining about extremist web sites (which, as you note, really are worrisome), but about anonymity and the alleged “infection” of respectable sites by anti-semites on the comment threads.
In my own experience with high-comment-volume sites, those that “ban” crazy people do a reasonably good job, and on those that don’t ban crazy people, peer ostracism usually gets the job done. As you say, anonymity is largely irrelevant. Serious crazies don’t mind identifying themselves. Poseurs and agents provocateurs (along with a lot of folks with legitimate reasons for failing to disclose their identities) may use pseudonyms, but they are not the problem.
Gerson’s barking up the wrong tree, aside from his huge blind spot about radio, cable and right-wing opinion generally.
Ed Kilgore
Gerson’s original argument has some merit — message boards are indeed polluted with racist screeds. I myself worry more about more subtle screeds — disinformation with links to WorldNet Daily, etc. Not all of the bad actors in our culture are so helpful about flagging themselves with racist slurs and the use of the caps lock.
But still, the basic argument is that comments sections and message boards matter. On this point I agree with Gerson more than Klein. Lies proliferate on Twitter, and if you try and respond to them all (I know this from personal experience) they’ll suspend your account for spamming. I’m not as sanguine about Gerson’s own suggested solutions, though.
One solution he offers is more monitoring, but there are problems with aggressive monitoring too. The lag in posting time prevents conversation (you might spend half the day waiting for your reply to appear), and the poorly paid grunts that do it get a power complex.
For example, (another thing I know from personal experience) you can’t suggest Roland Martin’s support for Roland Burris may have been influenced by his race and expect your comment to be posted in Martin’s CNN message board. And if you point out to Jack Cafferty on his Cafferty File board that right wing craziness is mouthed on CNN itself — by guests on Lou Dobb’s show, AND by Lou Dobbs — the administrator will delete all references to Dobbs before he posts your edited comment.
Yet another thing I know from personal experience: if you happened to notice that Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire was bullet no news about the Prop 8 fight in California, and asked him to, he not only didn’t do it, not only deleted your posts when you tried to discuss the matter under any other topic, but banned you from posting at all.
The second solution Gerson suggests is that nobody should be allowed to post under a username — you should have to sign everything with your own identity. That idea chills me to the bone. Maybe Sicilians should have to do that before they criticize the Mafia on message boards; I wonder how that would work out.
If your next door neighbor believes abortion doctors should be shot on sight, and you do not, you can express it anyplace now on the internet without your neighbor finding out and leaving cow’s blood on your stoop at night. I’m not sure at all that making people own up publicly to all their own comments is the way to avoid intimidating behavior in society.
What I’m most worried about regarding anti-Semites and the Internet isn’t so much the anti-Semitic railing on regular websites but the use of specifically anti-Semitic blogs and boards to cluster and organize. It’s not that anti-Semites are going to convert everybody on the message boards of respectable news organizations, but that lonely anti-Semites in Oregon will meet lonely anti-Semites in Utah, and they’ll organize retreats and get-togethers, and uh, activities….
And although that may be a drop in the ocean of the Internet, I don’t think such sites should be dismissed too easily. Also, factually speaking, when Gerson brings up the Holocaust Museum shooter (in what he thinks is his aha moment) he’s bringing up an individual whose blogging on the Internet WAS under his own name, and who WAS therefore known by name to law enforcement organizations and the Southern Poverty Law Center. We don’t have preventive detention in this country (well, we’re not supposed to), but thanks to the Internet, the guy was at least on the radar.
Finally, yes, I agree with Klein in taking hate radio more seriously than I take the Father Coughlins of the Net. Limbaugh and Savage and Liddy are often just as bad as all but the worst neo-Nazis and Klansmen on the web, and their audience is much larger. When you look at polls, and at how many Americans now think Obama is foreign born or a secret Muslim, it’s shocking. These things may circulate on message boards, but they circulate on right wing radio and TV too, to bigger effect. Gerson may not want to talk about that, and may want to whitewash his compatriots, but it’s still true. If he condemns it one place, why so ostentatiously refuse to condemn it everywhere?
And don’t tell me more people don’t believe what they hear on Rush Limbaugh’s show more readily than what they read an anonymous poster screaming on the Net. Limbaugh addresses great big Republican groups, who cheer him to the rafters. The Washington tea party protesters kept saying they were there because of Glenn Beck. Why is Gerson defending as free speech from Beck or Limbaugh what he wants an administrator to delete when Joe Anybody says it?
Glenn Beck isn’t a racist because Klein disagrees with him. Glenn Beck is a racist because he claims the white race is being victimized and targeted by Barack Obama’s concealed hatred of the white race. He’s not a Nazi because he disagrees with us; we disagree with him because he’s a Nazi. It’s a bit like telling Jesse Owens his only problem with Hitler is that he insists on being Jesse Owens.
Hate speech is a seamless robe worn now by far too much of the right, and it’s harder than ever to tell the mainstream on the right from the fringe. Gerson can’t obscure that by making artificial distinctions between the hate speech of syndicated speakers and the hate speech that appears at the sufferance of privately owned message boards. It doesn’t smell any better just because somebody’s getting paid for it.