By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Joe Biden has been around long enough that he knows a
president really gets to do only one or two things. Barack Obama got his failed
health-care scheme, Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts and eventual victory in the
Cold War, Donald Trump got Paul Ryan’s tax cuts and Mitch McConnell’s judges,
Bill Clinton got . . . reelected.
Fortunately for Biden, he has only one thing to do at
home. Unfortunately, he is already screwing that one thing up.
COVID-19 is, for the foreseeable future, the only domestic issue. From the specific
public-health problem to the economy to crime and homelessness and mental
health, COVID-19 is, at the moment, the master-issue that comprises almost
every other domestic issue of any consequence. The Biden administration’s
execution of a credible and effective COVID-19 response — or its failure to
achieve that — is, barring some unexpected development, the only thing anybody
is going to remember about this presidency.
The near-term response will have two main parts: the
economic-recovery component and the vaccination component.
The vaccination rollout is an almost purely logistical
problem. Securing adequate resources will not be difficult, and Republicans
will lose — and lose badly — if they oppose it.
The economic picture is different.
The Democrats’ cynical effort to make the COVID-response
bill a slop-pail into which funds for every Democratic constituency may be
poured is bad policy and bad politics. And it is, inevitably, running into
Republican resistance — not from shellshocked post-Trump opportunists with an
eye on the 2024 nomination but from Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, i.e., from
the Republicans the Biden administration can do business with and will have to do business with if it wants to
get anything meaningful accomplished. For the moment, a handful of relatively
moderate Republican senators hold real power in Washington.
Biden appears to be overestimating the goodwill he can
expect to enjoy, and the honeymoon very probably will end up being shorter than
he expects.
If the Biden administration were to put its weight behind
a responsible COVID-response bill,
Republicans would have a choice between cooperating and handing the new
administration a success or resisting, losing the fight badly, and watching the
new administration enjoy a double success as the opposition suffers a bruising
political defeat going to the wall in a dumb fight the Democrats were always
going to win.
But the politics of an irresponsible bill are different:
The Biden administration is going to get a lot of mileage tarring the GOP as
the party of Trump, but that is not going to work very well against Senator
Romney. It won’t work very well against Mitch McConnell, either. It will work
even less well if Trump is convicted in the Senate, as he should be and may be.
If the Biden administration insists on attempting to use
COVID-19 as an excuse to grease every Democratic palm from Chicago to
Sacramento, it probably will pay a price for that. The Republicans are in a
weak position, but they are not dead — and the Republicans who were most
weakened in November are the ones whose marginalization is no great loss.
Senator McConnell is pretty good at opposition from the minority.
Likewise, leaning on executive orders rather than
immediately working toward a genuinely bipartisan approach with Congress would
move Biden toward becoming the last thing he wants to be: a Democratic echo of
Trump, limited to unilateral executive action because he cannot work with
lawmakers, a symbolic president rather than an effective one.
This isn’t 2009. Joe Biden cannot buckle on the armor of
Barack Obama — he does not enjoy the same mytho-heroic status. And, unlike
Obama in 2009, Biden is not faced with a crisis that is financial in origin and
has a financial solution — COVID-19 is not going to sort itself out in the
marketplace. Obama’s main source of political pressure was the Republican
opposition — but as the GOP continues to bleed from its self-inflicted wounds,
Biden’s main source of pressure is going to be the left wing of the Democratic
Party, which would have preferred a President Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth
Warren but accepted Biden as an expedient, and which has too big an appetite to
be bought off cheap. Even the $1.9 trillion that’s being packed into Democrats’
COVID-19 proposal will only be a light appetizer for progressives who want to
impose monopoly health care on the country, abolish college tuition, etc.
COVID-19 should be, strange as it is to write it, the easy thing. Everybody wants a successful
vaccination program, and everybody wants a strong economic recovery — anybody
who runs against those is on a kamikaze mission. There will be honest
disagreements about size, scope, and details, and Democrats are likely to win
most of those fights this year — provided they do not get too greedy.
Getting it right on COVID-19 — politically right — would free the Biden administration up to
pursue what should be its other top priority: rebuilding the trans-Atlantic
alliance with an eye toward countering Beijing militarily, politically, and
economically. That one has some tricky bits in it, too, but also should be — should be — eased along by broad
bipartisan consensus about the end and many of the means. There, too, Biden has
the opportunity to get some wins — a deepened U.S.-EU economic alliance would
almost certainly move the country in the Democrats’ direction on environmental
issues and labor policy. And some Republicans will be all too happy to go along
with the Democrats on labor. Again, the main risk there is Democrats’ getting
greedy, demanding a 90/10 split instead of the 60/40 one they could easily
secure.
Biden doesn’t have to make this hard for himself. But he probably will.
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