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.
I voted for her, but I think Martha Coakley was a terrible choice and a terrible candidate. She was smug, puffed up with a sense of entitlement, unable to articulate her positions clearly or defend them credibly. If she’s the best candidate we can field for a critical seat at a critical time, we should prepare ourselves for another generation or two of kleptocratic crony capitalism under a Republican administration.
Question for Imn2Paine: why is forking over to rich freeloaders OK while taking care of the poor and supporting the middle class is not?
Imn2Paine,
As you stand against our paying to provide for the poor, you might consider that no one chooses to be poor. Contrary to popular opinion, we human beings do not have a free will to be and do as we would like. Our genes (nature) and our past experiences (nurture) completely determine who we are, and what we will or will not do.
If the Mass. race is not about Coakley, it’s also not about health care. It’s more fundamentally about the basic premises upon which we have created our society. One of them, the belief that we humans have the power to freely choose who we will become and what we will thereafter do, is as false as the literal belief in an Adam and Eve, and a Garden of Eden, or the belief in a flat Earth.
It’s unfortunate that so much of politics is predicated upon an aspect of our world that science fully understands (except, of course, those scientists whose religious or philosophical beliefs over-ride their scientific background and reasoning), and the rest of us are almost completely ignorant of.
This is, or course, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or anyone else’s fault. I’m not sure we can even rightly say its God’s or the universe’s fault. It is just the way our world has come to be at this point in time.
If and when humanity finally overcomes this insidiously harmful notion of free will, you might better understand the logic behind our tending to those least fortunate among us.
By the way, if you’d like to read a good book that explains in clear scientific terms how it is actually unconscious processes that are responsible for EVERY choice we make, you might consider Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner’s 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will.
BTW
I am a Coakley supporter.
My comment above was relative to the voice of my moderate and conservative (Reagan Democrats) brothers.
I dislike the notion of a Brown victory.
The race is not about Martha Coakley! She may be what the Republican dominated/produced media/frame portrays her to be (common/not dynamic/victory expected), but the voters here are tired of forking out to the less advantaged.
Section 8 is a better deal than working for a living! Illegals do better than or equal to middle income citizens! You want health coverage? …FOR FREE [working folks and income (the “ownership society”) folks alike pay for it]!!!
A better gig for who?
Democrats in Mass. are moderate and don’t want to fork over for freeloaders, which is what may yield.
God help the Democrats!
If Brown wins, Obama and our Democratic Leaders deserve the blame, not Coakley. They should have been much more invested in her campaign from the very beginning. That’s their job.
If Brown wins, Obama and Reid have a simple choice before them; They can allow Republican Senators to filibuster all major legislation during 2010, which is not a choice at all since it would spell disaster for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House in November, or they can change the senate rules on filibusters through means as simple as one recently advanced in a New York Times Op-Ed by Tom Geoghegan;
“The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.”
Or through the strategy Jamie Court described in The Huffington Post;
“Rule 22 of the Senate, governing filibusters, can be changed or eliminated by a simple majority according to the US Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ballin (1892). Senate rules call for 67 to change the cloture rule, but Democrats should be able to rewrite the rules since they control the Rules Committee. Rule 22 can go out the door all together or be modified. Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to blow up the filibuster in 2005 with far fewer numbers.”
Or they could rely on the “Nuclear,” or “Constitutional” option. A 2005 report by Betsy Palmer highlights how this would be done. This strategy would have to wait until the new Congress convenes in 2011, and would therefore represent a retributive rather than a pre-emptive response to Republican obstructionism. Palmer describes it;
“One example of the “constitutional” or “nuclear” option revolves on the argument that, on the first day of a new Congress, Senate rules, including Rule XXII, the cloture rule, do not yet apply, and thus can be changed by majority vote.”
If Coakley wins, Democrats can pass major legislation in 2010. If Brown wins, Republicans have the choice in 2010 of allowing Obama to address our pressing concerns like jobs, education and climate change, or block these efforts and thereby force his and Reid’s hand. If Brown wins and Republicans continue to obstruct the Democratic agenda, Obama and Reid will have every good reason, and no reasonable choice but, to change the filibuster rule.
In fact, it might actually work out better in the long run if Brown wins and the Democrats are then forced to change the filibuster rule.
If Massachusetts voters, having passed health insurance reform for themselves, vote to deny it to the rest of Americans, I won’t be able to think of words bad enough for them.