Biden's Economic Triumph and Political Tragedy: Why did he not get more credit?

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-12-16-bidens-economic-triumph-political-tragedy/


President Joe Biden greets striking United Auto Workers on the picket line, September 26, 2023, in Van Buren Township, Michigan.

President Biden’s piece in the Prospect provides a fair, accurate, and impressive summary of all that he accomplished. A question that will perplex historians for some time to come is why Biden did not get more political credit, and why Vice President Harris was not able to turn the real achievements of the Biden-Harris presidency into a winning campaign. A related question is how the policy success and political failure of the Biden presidency should inform the future positioning of the Democratic Party. In early 2022, I published a book on the first two years of Biden’s presidency titled Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy. In that book, I credited Biden with governing as far more of a progressive than most Americans expected.

I attributed that shift to the economic circumstances he inherited, which required big, Roosevelt-scale government actions; and to the influence of allies to his left, most notably Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose counsel informed both Biden’s policies and personnel. I urged Biden to position himself as a great one-term president, something that Biden had hinted at in 2020, but then changed his mind after a better-than-expected midterm result in November 2022. Surprisingly, Biden became a convert not just to extensive emergency anti-recession spending (to a much greater degree than Obama in a worse recession) but also to a deeper repudiation of neoliberalism and an embrace of national economic planning for the sake of reviving domestic industry and good jobs.

So why didn’t Biden get more political credit?

First, the legislative phase of Biden’s presidency basically ended in January 2023 when he lost the House. And given the opposition of Sens. Manchin and Sinema, he never fully had the Senate in his first two years and delivered only part of his program. So even Biden’s truncated new New Deal only lasted for half his presidency.

Second, the 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation. Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit. Too many working-class voters still didn’t trust Democrats. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the complex dynamics of inflation got unfairly blamed on Biden. And the timing of the pop-up pandemic safety net meant that real benefits to Americans ran out on Biden’s watch, from expansions of Medicaid and unemployment insurance to the boosted Child Tax Credit, which Republicans and Manchin refused to renew.

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[legallyblondeNYC]

1. A strategy about the propaganda.

Among Biden's top priorities should have been establishing means and methods of fighting the propaganda - particularly from foreign sources. Telling Russia to "cut it out" is not sufficient.