Biden changes his own ‘paradigm’

At his first press conference as president on Thursday, Joe Biden did more than detail his plans and answer questions from reporters.

He pointed out what amounts to a new political ethic for him, suggesting that grand ambition – rather than accommodation, or “unity” he so often spoke about during the election campaign – might be his guiding doctrine.

Biden repeated a particularly revealing phrase three times in a row – “I want to change the paradigm” – and made it clear that he intends to move forward with his political agenda as uncompromising as possible, with or without Republican support. It’s a message he’s likely to take home this week, when he shows up in Pittsburgh to unveil his proposed multibillion-dollar infrastructure and jobs investment.

In the process, he undermines the exact mark of central neoliberalism that he worked so hard to entrench, over four decades ago, as a young senator of the Nixon and Carter years.

“It’s an interesting story,” said historian Rick Perlstein, whose books detail the rise of late-20th-century conservatism in American politics, in an interview. “The story is that he is turning his back on the ideological direction in which he helped lead the Democratic Party.”

“I want to get things done,” Biden told reporters Thursday. “I want them to be done according to what we promised the American people. And to do that in a 50-50 Senate, we have to get to where I get 50 votes, so the Vice President of the United States can break the tie, or I get 51 votes without it. “

It was an interesting innovation on a common theme of Biden: pragmatism. “I’ve never been particularly poor at figuring out how to get things done in the United States Senate,” he said.

As recently as the 2020 campaign, Biden stressed the need for Republican support to “get things done” – but he now argues that wise politics and partisanship go hand in hand. By posting victories, he hopes to bring more voters to his side.

In part, that means embracing the possibilities that come with controlling both houses of Congress – something the Democrats had, almost continuously, from 1933 to 1981, but most of all they have lacked since President Ronald’s rise to power. Reagan.

Jonathan Alter, who has written books on Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter, said Biden’s approach was reminiscent of the economic populism of the New Deal era, when Roosevelt unified the northern and southern blocs of the Democratic Party. around major liberal initiatives.

“I think the ‘paradigm shift’ is an important way of saying it’s going to breathe new life into the New Deal social contract,” he said. “Roosevelt had these employment programs. They had direct hiring. It was not a spinoff economy; it was a direct investment in the economy.

He continued, “The Democrats, I think, are trying to get back to this idea that this is not tax-wasting liberalism – which is the label they started using against Jimmy Carter and all the Democrats who have. monitoring – but careful investments.

Alter said Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion relief package already put him ahead of what Roosevelt had handed out at this point during his first term. “It’s hard to imagine, but in his first 100 days he didn’t spend as much in constant dollars as Biden,” Alter said, referring to adjustments that take inflation into account.

When Carter ran for president in 1976, a young Senator Biden – a first-term moderate, whose star was on the rise – became the first senator to support him. Amid a booming economy and rising crime rates, Carter, a former small business owner and naval engineer, believed the Democratic Party was ready for a change in orthodoxy.

“He had a kind of deep distrust of the New Deal tradition,” Perlstein said, noting that upon taking office, Carter canceled a number of infrastructure projects that would have increased sustained employment. by the government.

Biden’s message at the time fitted in perfectly with this approach. “In 1978, when he ran for re-election, he bragged about being the most frugal senator,” Perlstein said.

Biden was also publicly ambivalent about many of the steps Democrats were taking to protect the legacy of the civil rights movement, becoming the most prominent Democrat not representing a Southern state to oppose school buses – and later helping to create the kind of hardness. -criminal policies which would result in a considerable increase in the number of black and brown men in federal prisons.

Biden was “determined to be seen as a more moderate Democrat, especially on issues like the bus,” Alter said.

By the time Biden organized his first presidential race in 1988, political tides seemed to validate this path. Four years earlier, Walter Mondale had lost in a landslide against Reagan after promising major investments in public services and higher taxes for wealthy Americans. Although Mondale presented his proposals through a lens of fiscal pragmatism – claiming they would significantly reduce the budget deficit – Reagan took the opportunity to label Mondale a tax democrat and he was easily re-elected.

Raising taxes has become a third rail in American politics, and the next time a Democrat won the presidency – Bill Clinton, in 1992 – he did so in part by avoiding big Liberal promises. In his 1996 State of the Union address, ahead of a successful re-election campaign, Clinton triumphantly declared: “The era of great government is over.

But as Biden pointed out the economic impact of his $ 1.9 trillion relief package last week, it was hard not to hear echoes of campaign language from a different Democrat from the 1980s: Jesse Jackson, arguably the most left-wing Democratic presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988. He pledged to “keep hope” at a time when American policy was turning to the right.

“I can tell you, the American people,” Biden said Thursday, “help is here and hope is on the way.”

Public opinion polls have indicated that Biden’s first big salvo was very popular: more than six in 10 Americans backed the relief program, according to polls conducted just before it was passed. And as he pushes to raise taxes for the wealthiest Americans, he is speaking to a country that is now arguably more concerned with inequality than an anti-tax reflex.

A Politico / Harvard University poll last month found that 73% of the country said Biden should make it an “extremely important priority” to raise taxes for the wealthiest Americans, while lowering them for the middle class. Biden said raising taxes for people who earn more than $ 400,000 a year would be key to funding his investments in infrastructure and jobs.

For Perlstein, the trajectory of the president is reminiscent of the career not of Roosevelt or Carter, but of Lyndon Johnson. “In 1960, when he was chosen as Kennedy’s running mate, the Liberals were all in mourning that this conservative, establishment, and segregated southerner had been chosen,” Perlstein said. “Immediately when JFK was assassinated and picked up the ball, he became the guy who broadened the New Deal for a new generation.

Perlstein added that only “those who were truly closest to him, who understood how hard his heart beats for the poor and how seductively he looked forward to this opportunity to evolve the American racial ideal in a different way. , would have expected ”.

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