Joe Biden gambles on his feel for the voters

Joe Biden returns to home in Greenville, Delaware, after a trip to the tip in 2008. Picture: AP

In his famous book about the 1988 presidential campaign, journalist Richard Ben Cramer wrote that the then young candidate Joe Biden believed from the outset of his career that his principal asset was less a governing program or philosophy, and more a gut feeling for voters: “He was so sure he knew where the people stood. They were like him, he was like them.”

More than three decades later, of course, that same Joe Biden became US President. That same gut feeling helps explain the considerable political gamble Biden is taking in the program he has laid out.

Biden — seen widely as a moderate, and as the least revolutionary of the major Democrat candidates for president in 2020 — is going big, bold and risky. He proposed to congress on Thursday his third expansive initiative in less than four months, a $US1.8 trillion ($2.3 trillion) plan to provide universal preschool, cost-free community college education, significant government help for those seeking child care, and more.

That proposal comes atop the recently enacted $US1.9 trillion coronavirus-relief and stimulus package and a $US2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal. Those plans require not just big and broad tax increases, as well as larger deficits, at least in the short term; they also test Biden’s campaign assurances that he could find a way to work with Republicans and to bring the country together behind his governing style.

Joe Biden addresses a joint session of congress on Thursday as Kamala Harris, left, and Nancy Pelosi applaud at the US Capitol in Washington. Picture: AFP

In short, Biden has chosen not just an ambitious agenda, but a perilous one as well. It’s a strategy rooted in that Biden belief he understands the average folks to whom he refers often, and in a conviction the shock of the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis has left Americans persuaded the country needs a Franklin Roosevelt-sized rebuild and reboot.

He appears convinced the country is at an inflection point, and that he will bring along his countrymen in response, even if he can’t bring along Republicans in congress.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain refers to the President’s overall effort as “rebuilding the backbone of the country, rebuilding the soul of the country”. And he insists nobody should be surprised: “He laid this all out in pretty elaborate, often mind-numbing detail over the course of the campaign — very long policy papers and very detailed speeches. Everything we’re doing is what he said we were going to do.” By and large, that is true. The surprise, perhaps, lies in Biden’s resolve to stick with those plans despite his Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in congress.

The perils are plentiful. The first is economic. Larry Summers, head of the National Economic Council when Barack Obama was president and Biden was vice-president, warned last week that the government spending the administration is proposing could set off a new bout of high inflation.

But there also are political risks. The first is that Biden is over-reading the mandate he and his party received in the 2020 election. His party didn’t win a broad majority as Roosevelt’s Democrats in 1932. Democrats lost seats in the House of the Representatives and own control of the Senate only because of the tiebreaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Political analyst Charlie Cook says the overall 2020 results showed “a late-developing fear of Democrats overreaching”. He adds that a pattern has emerged in American politics: “Overreach has become the norm. We now have had four consecutive presidents lose both House and Senate majorities, a first in American history.” Indeed, there are signs that Biden won the presidency because of the support of moderate and independent voters as much as loyal Democrats. A third of voters described themselves as moderates, and they went for Biden over former Donald Trump by a 62 per cent to 36 per cent margin, according to AP Votecast, a broad nationwide survey of 2020 voters.

Still, the same survey showed that the damage from the coronavirus ran deep for many voters: Almost four in 10 said someone in their household had lost a job or income to the pandemic, which suggests a constituency for big remedies.

Moreover, polls show that the individual components of Biden’s program are generally popular — and that there is broad support for raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for working-class benefits. The President is calculating that he understands those sentiments — and gambling that he can turn them into political success now, which will breed more success later.

The Wall Street Journal