The Split-Screen Presidency

I t’s difficult to hide these days. Time was when a politician could tell two different audiences two different things and get away with it. Now, we live in split screen.

During the recent presidential election, we were treated to a startling illustration of this each time then-candidate Joe Biden told the country he was a moderate, only to be corrected by friendly pundits and devout advocates who, unlike him, seemed to have read his platform. In essence, the year 2020 brought us two candidacies: On the right side of the screen, there was Joe Biden, who talked of decency, unity, moderation, and normalcy; on the left, there were his party and its vanguard, who talked of renaissance and reconstruction. From the start, the two were at odds. Only time could tell which would prevail.

And already, time is telling. Today, defending the proposition that Joe Biden is instinctively a moderate but that his party is the problem is akin to defending the proposition that Macbeth is a peaceful man but that his wife is the problem. In a highly technical sense it is defensible, and yet in practice it means nothing of consequence, for no amount of vehemence will bring Banquo back to life. We are now 45 days into Biden’s presidency, and his accomplishments and ambitions are being openly compared to FDR’s. Having spent $1.9 trillion on progressive priorities on the waning pretext of COVID-19, Biden, we are now told, has his sights on another $2–$4 trillion in spending on infrastructure; on a public option of the sort that could not get through a filibuster-proof Senate a decade ago; on the wholesale (and likely unconstitutional) rewriting of the American election system; on a federal takeover of local police departments; on the national prohibition of the right to work, which has been explicitly protected since 1947 and was protected de facto before 1935; on a $15 minimum wage; on the dramatic narrowing of traditional freelance work; on the prohibition, and maybe confiscation, of the most commonly owned rifle in the country; and on the first major tax hike since 1993 — all on the heels of a flurry of hard-left executive orders so relentless and so prolific that even the New York Times urged him to tap the brakes. A reasonable polity can debate the efficacy and desirability of these measures without fear or favor, but a reasonable polity will not misdescribe them — and “moderate” is by no means the mot juste.

If the recently passed “COVID relief” bill is any indication, the Democratic Party intends to have it both ways in government, as well as on the campaign trail. Before the law passed, Biden and his team were careful to cast it as a discrete measure designed to address a discrete problem. The president, his team liked to say, was “laser-focused” on fighting COVID-19, and the “American Rescue Plan” — note the name — was “an historic piece of legislation that addresses a major crisis.” In an attempt to imply that the bill was as lean it could be, Biden liked to demand rhetorically, “What would you have me cut?” Meanwhile, those who opposed it were held to be misreading the room. “Trying to apply political lessons from the past to the situation we face now is a mistake,” the White House’s Anita Dunn told CNBC. “It just isn’t analogous. The country has never been through this before.” (That “it,” lest anyone wonder, was the pandemic.)

Once the bill had passed, however, the portrayal shifted instantly. The day after passage, the New York Times’ news team described the package as “a rapid advance in progressive priorities but also a realignment of economic, political and social forces” and acknowledged that it had happened because “an energized progressive vanguard pulled the Democrats leftward, not least Mr. Biden, who had campaigned as a moderating force.” Meanwhile, on the paper’s opinion pages, Nick Kristof argued that the bill represented “a revolution in American policy” — indeed, that it was nothing less than the first step in a resetting of the political baseline — while Jamelle Bouie proposed that it “compares favorably with the signature legislation of Roosevelt’s first 100 days, in that its $1.9 trillion price tag dwarfs the mere tens of billions (in inflation-adjusted dollars) spent by Congress during the earliest period of the New Deal.” At New York magazine, Eric Levitz echoed these characterizations, portraying the bill as “the largest anti-poverty program in a generation,” and noting that it was of a piece with a president who had “packed his Cabinet with a cornucopia of progressive wonks” and “full-employment fanatics” who “occupy damn-near every economic post in the White House.” As might be expected, Bernie Sanders did the best job of illuminating just how widely the notion of emergency had been stretched. “This country today,” Sanders said, “faces a series of unprecedented crises.” Or, to update a famous phrase from the last Democratic administration: Never let a good crisis end.

The core problem with our previous president was that there was far too much of him — so much, in fact, that at no point during his tenure did he deign to adapt to his office. The core problem with our current president is that he doesn’t seem to exist at all, except as a carapace under which the real movers and shakers in his party might hide. I have long desired a return to the days of the quiet chief executive, who understands the limitations of his role, feels no eagerness to commentate on all of civil society’s twists and turns, and willingly defers to Congress on all questions over which he lacks explicit control. Superficially, Biden exhibits some of these tendencies, but in truth he represents the worst of both worlds: He is an avatar, there to draw the public’s attention away from the nature of his party and its policies, so that other people might govern in ways that no one quite sees. At some point, when the left and the right screens so directly contradict each other that the ruse can no longer be sustained, this game will be up, and the screens will melt slowly into one. What the country looks like after that fusion happens will depend on when, and how fast, it comes.