Does Joe Biden have a deliberate strategy for dealing with his party’s progressives, or is he just winging it?
I chatted with our old friend Jonah Goldberg on his podcast Tuesday, and Jonah shared the theory that President Biden and his team around him had spent 2020 preparing to run an executive branch where their ambitions were reined in by divided government – and they’ve been trying to catch up and adapt since the Georgia runoff election returns came in.
“My friend A.B. Stoddard makes the case, I was once completely convinced on, that they [the Biden team] never planned on having control of the Senate, and so they made up a lot of this stuff,” Jonah said, about 45 minutes in. “They thought in the runoff, at least one seat would go to the Republicans. And all of a sudden, they had to say, ‘what do we have on the shelf?’ And they said, ‘we’ve got the New Deal, let’s try that!’ And they don’t actually know how to implement that kind of thing, and I think it’s starting to show.”
Yesterday, I heard this theory in reverse from a well-connected media voice, that Joe Biden is now going full speed ahead to the left, with the expectation that sooner or later circumstances will force him to move back to the center. The idea is that Biden more or less knows that the progressive wing of the party will wildly overreach, and is likely to steer his party into a ditch in the 2022 midterms. But if Biden stuck to a moderate, half-a-loaf course early in his presidency, the progressive wing and the “Squad” would only grow more frustrated and combative.
So instead, Biden swings for the fences to emulate Franklin Roosevelt and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is thrilled: “The Biden administration and President Biden have exceeded expectations that progressives had. I’ll be frank, I think a lot of us expected a lot more conservative administration.” If America loves it, Biden is the beneficiary, and lives happily ever after.
If America doesn’t love proposals like…
- expanding the size of the Supreme Court
- spending $6 trillion in three spending bills passed in rapid succession
- making Washington D.C. a state
- effectively eliminating right-to-work laws
- a ban on assault weapons
- a $15 per hour minimum wage
- limits on carbon emissions
- amnesty for illegal immigrants
- a ban on state voter-ID requirements
… then the Democrats will probably have an awful midterm cycle in 2022.
But you may have noticed, Joe Biden has been in Washington for a long time. He remembers how badly the 2010 midterms went for Democrats… and how Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. He remembers how badly the 1994 midterms went for Democrats… and how Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996. Sometimes a president getting clobbered in the midterms works out okay in the long run, as the president course-corrects back to the center, the ideological hardliners in his party are quieted by defeat, and the new Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader becomes a foil for the president to run against. One party holding the White House, Senate, and House means they can enact more of their agenda, but they get all of the blame when things go wrong.
A Republican wave in 2022 could be really bad for House Democrats, and perhaps Senate Democrats… but maybe not quite so bad for Joe Biden. And after a midterm where Republicans win control of the House, the Senate, or both, Biden could go back to his old blueprint and comfort zone that assumed divided government. And the Squad wouldn’t have much of an argument against it, as attempting to enact their preferred agenda had just proven to be a disaster in the midterms.
Or maybe Biden already feels like he’s done enough to placate the progressives. The Biden administration appears to be a little more patient about reaching a bipartisan deal than they did a few months ago, at least on two big priorities. After rejecting GOP counter-proposal on the COVID relief bill, the Biden team seems a little more eager to work out a bipartisan deal with Senator Shelley Moore Capito on infrastructure and Sen. Tim Scott on police reform.
And Biden and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan had a heated discussion about Israel on a tarmac in Detroit. Maybe the Biden-Squad alliance has already seen its best days.