Joe Biden Knew He Was Onto Something Long Before We Did

The advent of Covid-19 changed his conception of the presidency for the better.

By Jamelle Bouie Opinion Columnist @ NYTimes.com, March 12, 2021

Last year, as he steamrolled his way to victory in the Democratic presidential primaries, Joe Biden told CNN that the pandemic was “probably the biggest challenge in modern history, quite frankly.”

“I think it may not dwarf but eclipse what F.D.R. faced,” he added.

Biden referred to Franklin Roosevelt again in an interview with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. “I’m kind of in the position F.D.R. was,” he said.

And a week before the election, Biden gave a speech at Roosevelt’s winter White House in Warm Springs, Ga., where he promised to “overcome a devastating virus” and “heal a suffering world.”

In other words, Biden telegraphed his F.D.R.-size ambition throughout the year. And the first major bill of his administration is in fact an F.D.R.-size piece of legislation.

[....]

I would even say that the American Rescue Plan compares favorably with the signature legislation of F.D.R.’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. The challenge is very different — a Great Depression and its attendant unemployment and immiseration versus a health crisis and its economic impact — but the ambition is of similar scope.

Indeed, the story of this bill may be the story of how Biden has repudiated the austerity politics of much of the last decade, as well as the anti-assistance paradigm he himself helped forge when, as a senator, he warned in 1988 of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars” and voted, in 1996, to make so-called welfare reform a reality.

The American Rescue Plan is only a start. Because the administration was limited by the budget reconciliation process, many of its provisions need to be made permanent. Which is to say that there is still a lot of work left for the Biden administration and the Democratic majorities that exist, for now, in Congress, much of it tied to whether the Senate will reform itself to allow majority rule.

That said, we can and should acknowledge that this bill is, as Biden once said of Obamacare, a very big deal for the country. And we can marvel, at least a little, at the trajectory of his political career, as this consummate centrist and proud bipartisan dealmaker begins to move in somewhat unexpected directions.

The most stunning part of President Biden's speech was totally missed by the media

By John Stoer @ Alternet.org, March 12

The president said something stunning last night during an address that marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the covid pandemic. If the press corps had been truly paying attention, it would be headline news. What Joe Biden said reflects the sea change I've been talking about here in the Editorial Board, a fundamental shift in thinking about pretty much everything. "We need to remember the government isn't some foreign force in a distant capital," he said. "No, it's us. All of us. We, the people."

I might be wrong, but I don't recall any president talking like this in my lifetime. Not even Barack Obama. While the former president certainly spoke of the importance of duty and community, it was always placed in an acceptable framework, one assuring white voters that the first Black president represented consonance with a conservative view of government, rather than dissonance. The current president is not making any such attempts at assurance. This is something new, something wholly extraordinary.

Think about it. Without those assurances, all the assumptions of the past must be rethought. The biggest assumption, the one that was so widely understood as to be "natural," was this: the government is not public good. Ergo, the political solution to most, if not all, political problems was minimizing its role in the lives of individuals. Key to this assumption was the raw conviction that the government and the citizenry are two separate and unequal things—the diametric opposite of what the president said.

This presumed separation between the government and the citizenry is important to keep in mind, because without it, it's impossible to understand conservative attitudes toward taxation, an attitude that has dominated policy discourse over the last four decades. Because of this presumed separation between the government and the citizenry, conservatives starting with President Ronald Reagan could characterize taxation as a form of "government tyranny," as something done to citizens, instead of something done by them—instead of something citizens should take responsibility for. Of the many sources of "political polarization" we experience today, I'd say this one, the unequal separation between the government and the citizenry, is its main source.

But what is the source of that? The answer, I think, can be found in the reaction to Harry Truman's civil rights platform at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, during which Jim Crow states walked out and later rallied around the presidential "Dixiecrat" candidacy of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who said: [....]

by Thomas Edsall, not exactly a slouch at reading political tea leaves.

yet more praise for his apolitical methods:

another example of how his "nonpartisan" approach was never really about the current Congress. He's not Obama, it's not fhe same thing as it was with him. Anyone who thinking that it was, took it within the wrong frame:

His whole life he develops the personal relationship thing first, then works on the politics, not the other way around?