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In the Rose Garden of the White House, where for four years Donald Trump loudly celebrated political victories with his allies, it was now the Democrats’ turn to take a victory lap – masked and physically distant, of course.
Kamala Harris, the vice president, praised Joe Biden for signing a $ 1.9 billion coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the U.S. welfare state in decades . “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on every page of the American Rescue Plan,” said Harris.
Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, traveling the country telling Americans directly how the hard-won legislation will improve their lives.
The sale has always been seen as Trump’s strong suit, but it’s a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely savior. The oldest president ever elected – at 78 – figures prominently in opinion polls. His rescue plan is approved by three out of four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a cohesive counter-narrative, bickering for Trump and obsessed with culture wars.
But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: Presidents and prime ministers who start to rise inevitably fall. He also spoke of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, intervened to avoid financial disaster in 2009, was rewarded with a “bombardment” for Democrats in the mid-term elections.
Politics is all about momentum, and with the vaccines to come, the economy poised to turn back and leap into the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is kind of on a roll right now so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and to be seen from the outside.
“They want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there will be times when they seem to be doing nothing right. “
In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, First Lady Jill Biden is expected to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware County, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain in the west with a stopover in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Wednesday.
At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip to Atlanta, where the Democrats’ victories in two Senate votes in January were crucial in pushing through the back-up plan against the die-hard Republican opposition.
The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic stimulus package. Biden, who was vice president at the time, told his colleagues last week that Obama was modest and didn’t want a victory lap. “We paid the price, ironically, for this humility,” he said.
This award included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and the rise of right-wing populism. But there were important differences in substance and style. Obama’s $ 787 billion bill, which followed the bank bailout, enabled a recovery that seemed abstract and icy. This time around, the impact is more immediate and tangible: Some Americans will receive a stimulus payment of $ 1,400 this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopens underway.
Bill Galston, senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington thinktank and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the 2009 experience was etched in the memory of senior Democrats. : the interpretation of being too small. and paying the price for a painfully slow recovery, spending too much time in the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never compromise, not telling the American people what he had accomplished for him.
“The list of lessons learned is very long and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is fighting and winning the past war.”
Although they prevented the financial collapse, the Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest change since 1948. This fits a model in which the president’s party outgoing tends to do badly in the first half of the year, so Republicans are optimistic about their chances of winning both the House and Senate next year.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior Obama adviser, argues the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for midterms 2022, and warns Democrats cannot take credit for granted since Americans “currently have memories in mind.” long term of a sea cucumber ”.
He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and factory visits, “it was almost impossible to break the avalanche of bad news.” But “the benefits of this plan are more specific, easier to understand, and likely to be widely felt before too long.”
Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the social media messaging effort. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because few people knew how Barack Obama helped prevent the economy from slipping into a second Great Depression,” he said. he adds. “Let’s not do this again.”
The plan will also require strict monitoring to ensure that money is not poorly spent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former acting chairman of the Democratic National Committee said: “This is a massive bill with massive consequences, but it demands not only the president and vice president and cabinet, but also state governments and local people to work together to ensure that vaccines are launched fairly and ordinary citizens can benefit from some of the wonderful initiatives contained in the bill.
There has been a stark contrast between Biden and Harris’ disciplined focus on passing landmark legislation and Republicans’ fixation on Dr Seuss’ “cancellation of culture,” after the publishing house children’s author has announced that she is discontinuing several books containing racist images, over confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will always be a ‘Mr’.
The issue, which often gets more coverage in conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way to liven up the grassroots in a way the attacks on Biden don’t. The president is not black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, who all seem to have inoculated him against demonization by the right-wing attack machine.
And despite his popularity with the public, every Republican senator has opposed the US bailout, giving Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Said: “It will be interesting to see how much they make of the plan’s advantages over the Republicans having no not voted for the plan. “
Chen, policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, added, “The challenge for Democrats is going to be that the elements of this exit that will be unpopular, are they going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that are unpopular. seems to be politically favorable enough? ”
The OECD predicts that the bailout will help the US economy grow at a rate of 6.5% this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But like Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair found out, all political honeymoons end.
Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the emerging crisis of an outbreak of children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare push for unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is unlikely to last. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even more difficult.
But it’s the US bailout, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, said: “They are betting on the economic recovery and I hope they are right because I want the the US economy is recovering rapidly. ”
But, he added, “I think people will continue to learn more about parts of this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic recovery. There is certainly a real risk of backfire. “
Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added, “We could be on the cusp of another Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and such pent-up demand for people to travel, live and spend. money. We could also prime the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is usually the number one issue in an election and there is a very real chance that we have a huge advantage or dangers ahead.
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