Joe Biden Wants His FDR Moment
Has the Centrist Realized His Past Will Not Work as his Presidential Prologue?
Throughout his personal life, Joe Biden has suffered significant personal loss. Losing a spouse and children cannot be described if it has not been experienced. As a politician, Biden was a centrist democrat who always seemed in the middle of legislation that can best be described as “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” For the lifetime of senatorial and vice-presidential service, his sins have come back to haunt him.
Although Biden was otherwise a strong civil rights advocate, at least as a vote caster, his opposition to busing as an integration tool and his eulogizing of Strom Thurmond is not tracking with the more ideologically pure voters of today’s Democratic party. For most policies and tolerance limits, I count myself among those ideologically pure. Biden’s record is not excellent.
The Anita Hill hearings. The Defense of Marriage Act. The crime bill widely criticized as further decimating communities of color already under the thumb of an oppressive justice system. Biden’s greatest crime, for which blood is on his hands, is the vote to authorize the Iraq war. If not the evidence, Biden had been around long enough to know the players pushing the invasion were not remotely trustworthy, and there was no excuse to vote to start a war that has sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths.
In fairness, many people of conscience made Biden’s errors on all these issues. No politician is free of living in his or her time. All are judged on that conduct by generations they had not thought of when casting those votes. I am not forgiving Biden nor asking those who are deeply suspicious of his commitment to the leftward tilt of the party to do so.
I am curious if the Biden rising from the wreckage of 2020 COVID-19 has finally shed the skin of his past character and insistence on institutional traditions for a legacy and what actual Americans need. Perhaps his long-held insistence on bipartisanship and the buddy’s club of the Senate of his day has faded away. He must see that the McConnell senate is a photo negative of the Senate he remembers. Since Biden hopes for a definitive Democratic majority and support for removing the filibuster, his love for Senate traditions has left the building.
The former Vice-President’s rhetoric has taken a definite left tilt. His campaign has made sincere efforts to include in the policy structuring of his eventual possible presidency those democrats much more leftist than he. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chairing economic policy committees for the man all too happy to remove Glass-Steagall, neuter financial regulation, and assure wealthy donors they are not the problem and their money is safe is remarkable. It is a smart political move. Those two, and others like Elizabeth Warren, carry massive clout with the fed-up wing of the democratic bloc, and Biden knows it.
Biden made a bold move guaranteeing a female vice-president should he be nominated. A planned move but a bold one. The scuttlebutt suggests the only contenders of note are all women of color and each considerably accomplished in their respective spheres. I am a reluctant supporter of Biden-I align almost entirely with the Sanders philosophy-but I admit to a political masterstroke when I see one.
Biden will catch hell from the regressive traditionalists on the right accusing him of being a culture warrior for promising a government role based on gender instead of qualification. It crosses no one’s mind that while they may all be women, and they may all be persons of color, they are all so far as rumor has suggested candidacy esteemed individuals.
If Biden wins in November, he will be inheriting a country on fire and a government in disarray. When asked in informal conversations, my prediction tends toward the next President spending most of the next four years unraveling the messes and new normal that Trump and his cronies have injected into the federal government. Whether he can be bold considering circumstances remain unknown, given this massive challenge facing him. This election is the first in my memory that Americans are genuinely concerned may violate America’s most significant political contribution to the modern world: peaceful transitions of power. Can Biden handle problems both existential and practical and forge his desire to be the FDR of this young century?
From the seat of late July 2020, I issue a cautious yes. Biden and the Democratic party platform have explicit support for workers’ rights and union organizing that’s more sincere than it has been in a long time. Tax policy is looking more progressive and punishing to those who horde and hide wealth away from the needs of Americans. Biden did not even like billionaire taxes earlier this year. Now, it is his funding plan.
How does Biden navigate this landscape and emerge as an FDR style leader? What FDR does he want to be? Traditionally, Democrats revere FDR as the man who whipped the depression and brought about the much-needed social welfare and labor rights’ regimes that powered America’s post-war economic ascendance. The truth, as it often is, is much more complicated, but FDR deserves his reputation as the savior of a nation in crisis. Rare is the President whose reforms have so fundamentally shaped an entire century of national policy. FDR is one such President. Biden observing the wreckage of the Trump presidency and the tragedy of COVID-19, perhaps sees his opportunity to share that stage.
So far, his plans seem tilted at the left but not in their camp. On healthcare, he stubbornly refuses to endorse universal healthcare, preferring to bolster the ACA and add a public option. Of all the positions he has taken, despite the rage-mine included-for not committing to healthcare for all, Biden may understand the reality of this topic more than most. The ACA was the first step to universal healthcare; the public option will be the next. Eventually, those lead to universal care. Medicaid and Medicare were the progenitors of this slow road. A road Americans seem determined to travel most painfully. Do not be so sure Biden is anti-universal healthcare; he may know what is practical versus what is desired.
Massive funding upticks in education funding, free college, loan forgiveness, simplifying public service programs-these were not the high priorities of past administrations, despite the rhetoric. With debt soaring past a trillion dollars for the college-educated, a group mainly voting for Biden, this is the time for easing their debt burden. Is it the universal free college I want or my fellow leftists want? No, but it is a step in the right direction.
Biden has asserted the fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage is his policy principle. That the enhancement of programs already existing is central to his suite of economic programs to protect Americans suffering from this falling economy. Though touted as a runaway success by Trump and those around him, the economy, while on its face looking good, has an ugly underbelly. Inequality is worse than ever. Millions work multiple jobs for low pay to make almost nothing. The stock market, which seems the only indicator of success the President considers valid, prefers ruthless profit over broad prosperity. And not long ago, the stink on Biden’s political shoes was his insistence it was the man at the top and not this system that needed changing. He was only half right then, but somewhere along the way, he found a new song.
Biden has roadblocks. Two of his major issues are the sometimes loved, often embarrassing “Biden gaffes” that show perhaps not his true character but his generational training and lack of a snapping wit that politicos and the press find charming in the FDRs and Obamas of the past. Consider his “if you are not for Biden, you are not black” comment. Shocking on the surface, lacking any taste as a comment, but ultimately an inartful way of saying that Biden is the Pro-African American candidate, so how can you be against him? I do not and will never defend or condone the phrasing, but Biden did not mean racial harm or did not claim rulership over a race of voters. He is an older man used to and still receiving broad support among people of color and perhaps thought this “jokey” tone was ok. Biden has not learned the lesson there are things white people just cannot say.
Second, and more important than his gaffes, is that he is not a soaring Rhetorician. Considering the role model he has adopted, Biden has big shoes to fill. As a Democrat, coming from a party of profoundly inspiring speechmakers and masters of memorable phrases, Biden has a long way to go before he is claiming that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. That legacy goes right down to his former boss, Barack Obama, who gives speeches as to make angels weep if need be, and Biden could afford to take an inspirational cue or two from the former President.
In 2016, despite knowing what a monster Trump was and would be as President, I still held my nose when voting for Hillary Clinton. I did not hate her as some others did, but I always felt she wore her dynastic presumptions too boldly. I was excited in the early weeks of the primaries when I thought Democrats finally saw that bold initiatives were needed, and Sanders and Warren were prominent candidates. More so when Sanders took a significant lead. As with many, I too was disheartened when the electoral math no longer favored Sanders as the nominee, and Biden took his long-presumed place as the presidential candidate for the Democrats.
I do not know if I will ever give a full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden. I have never voted for a candidate in my adult life; I have always voted against the opposition. Sanders or Warren would have been the first “for” candidates in my life, which at 38 years old is a sad statement on the reality of American politics. I know that Biden needs to avoid running on his record. Some of it is inspiring; most of it is compromised and unusable in the current climate. At 77, his past can no longer be his prologue. 77 and after a lifetime of senatorial service may seem an odd time for re-invention, but if Biden wants to be the new FDR, so someday another candidate can be the new JRB, he needs to make bold promises and act on them decisively. Right now, at this time, both parties and both candidates are without a doubt not the same and Biden alone is the person who can prove that.