Sunday, January 24, 2021

Joe Biden’s First Mistake

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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