New era: Amid crises, Joe Biden and the establishment step back in

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell have known each other for decades. But are they in control?

They are 78, 80, 70 and 78 years old.

One started in Washington when Richard Nixon was president, the others when Ronald Reagan was. They have seen it all: wars, recessions, control by one party and then another, terrorist attacks, and, now, a pandemic.

They are, in short, the very personification of the political establishment that was attacked by American citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now they are, collectively, in charge of handling the aftermath.

Together, they all face the same question: Are they really in control?

They are, respectively, President-elect Joe Biden; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer; and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. They have known one another for decades, so there will be no surprises. They will be overseeing a Washington where the Senate is perfectly divided between the two parties and the House nearly so — a power alignment that, at least in theory, ought to draw them all a bit closer together near the political centre.

Yet they all face significant challenges in coming together.

Mr Biden takes office flanked on the left by a resurgent progressive wing of his party that may well attempt to overpower him, and on the right by a significant share of President Trump’s base that at least says it doesn’t believe his election was legitimate. There also is every reason to believe that Mr Trump, unlike other former presidents, won’t step back from public view to give his predecessor the space to govern, but instead seek a platform to attack him.

Donald Trump speaks at the border wall in Alamo, Texas. Picture: AFP.

Mr Biden has to hope that his particular political persona is well suited for the moment. Being the anti-Trump in style could be what the country is seeking; one theory of the presidency is that Americans seek in a new president the inverse of the last president. Mr Trump was an antiestablishment disrupter; Mr Biden will attempt to be the establishment unifier, and hope that is what the nation wants. His best hope may be to build a personal popularity that overcomes other structural obstacles, yet many Americans wonder whether he is too old or insufficiently in command of the party around him to do so.

The pending impeachment trial of President Trump in the Senate has the potential to be both an enormous distraction and deeply divisive at the outset of the Biden term. The opposite force pulling the nation together still could be that other crisis — the COVID-19 pandemic, for which Mr Biden will seek quick congressional approval of a new federal package of assistance. “The Covid crisis is not a blue-state crisis, is not a red-state crisis,” says senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn. “There is an urgency built into that calendar, because things are not going to get better. As a matter of fact, the disease itself, by all accounts, will continue to get worse, probably, coming out of the Christmas surge.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Picture: Getty Images.

The president-elect’s fellow leaders face similar challenges. Mrs Pelosi remains House Speaker, but with a shrunken majority. She is a liberal in good standing, yet now is flanked on her left by the Squad, a handful of assertive and demanding young progressives, and on the right by Democratic moderates who think the progressives’ cries to “defund the police” almost cost them their jobs.

Mr Schumer will be the Senate’s majority leader, but only because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ vote can break ties in a chamber divided 50-50 between the two parties. The Senate’s tools for obstruction will be a constant problem for him, unless he manoeuvres to end the filibuster — a step that Mr Biden seems to think unwise and that also would be deeply divisive.

For his part, Mr McConnell will be demoted to minority leader, which means his most obvious tool for accomplishing goals is rearguard action rather than frontal assault. One path for exerting influence will be to do deals with Mr Biden, with whom he has worked together in the past. The other is to stop deals.

And if he seeks to do deals, he will have to contend with whatever continuing resistance Mr Trump is able to exert from the outside, and with a handful of Republican senators interested in running for president in 2024, in part by playing to the Trump base.

Together, all four of these politicians represent a political establishment that Americans have been conditioned to view as corrupt or ineffective, not least through hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign ads over the years that begin with some variation of the proclamation that, “Washington is broken, and your representative is part of the problem.”

Yet they all also are in or near the final act of their careers. In theory, they have nothing to lose by taking some chances together. Will they?