In the Rose House Garden of the White House, where Donald Trump celebrated political victories with his allies for four years, it was now the turn of the Democrats to take a victory round – naturally masked and physically distanced.
Vice President Kamala Harris praised Joe Biden for signing a $ 1.9 tonne coronavirus bill, the largest 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 U.S. bailout plan,” Harris said.
Democrats passed the plan into law this week; now they have to sell it. Friday’s rally with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to set up an aggressive marketing campaign and travel the country to tell Americans directly how hard-won legislation will change their lives. improve.
Salesmanship has always been seen as Trump’s cutting edge, but it’s a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely savior. The oldest president ever elected – at the age of 78 – rides high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three out of four civilians. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter-story, quarreling over Trump and obsessive about cultural wars.
But Biden’s long career would have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers starting at the beginning will inevitably take a fall. He also spoke about the need to avoid the plight of Barack Obama, who, after intervening in 2009 to stave off the financial disaster, was reimbursed with a ‘hijacking’ for the Democrats in the midterm elections.
Politics is about momentum, and with the vaccination of vaccines, the economy will roar again and jump into the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the government of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, said: ‘In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is currently keeping something rolling, so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and out and about.
“They do want to take credit and he has to. The tides will turn; there will be periods when it seems like they can do nothing right. ”
In what the White House calls a Help is Lord tour, First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, are going to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff stays westward and stops Wednesday in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will undertake their first joint trip to Atlanta, where the Democrats’ victories in two Senate by-elections in January were important to pass the emergency relief package against the relentless Republican opposition.
The White House acknowledged that the PR offensive was an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and advance its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama is modest and does not want to take a victory. “Ironically, we paid a price for it for humility,” he said.
The price included a setback in the form of the Tea Party movement and the rise of right-wing populism. But there were important differences in content as well as style. Obama’s $ 787 billion bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and icy. This time, the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $ 1400 incentive payment this weekend, with massive vaccinations and reopening en route.
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s think tank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: ‘I underestimate the extent to which the 2009 experience has burned into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of being too small to become. and the price paid in a painfully slow recovery, at first spending too long to negotiate with members of the other party who will never agree and never compromise, and will not tell the American people what they have achieved for them not.
“The list of lessons learned is very long and to some extent I find it surprising that the government is fighting and winning the recent war.”
Despite preventing a financial collapse, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives during the 2010 midterm elections, the largest shift since 1948. This fits in with a pattern in which the current president’s party tends to fare badly in the early midterm terms. sail, and Republicans were thus raised. about their chances of reclaiming both the House and the Senate next year.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior Obama adviser, argues that the Covid aid bill is the beginning of the struggle for the mediocre times in 2022 and warns that Democrats cannot take credit for granted, as Americans “currently have long-term memory of a sea cucumber “.
He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was almost impossible to break through the deluge of bad news”. But “the benefits of this plan are more specific, easier to understand and are likely to be widely felt soon”.
Pfeiffer encouraged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messages via social media. “I hit a large part of 2009 and 2010 with my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew how Barack Obama helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added . “Let’s not do it again.”
The plan also requires strict supervision to ensure that money is not spent or wasted incorrectly. Donna Brazile, A former interim chairman of the Democratic National Committee said: “This is a massive bill with massive consequences, but it requires not only the president and vice-president and the cabinet, but also state and local governments to work together. to work to ensure that the vaccines are rolled. in a fair way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that appear in the bill. ‘
There was a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’ disciplined focus on the adoption of historic legislation and the Republican affirmation of “canceling culture,” of dr. Seuss, after the children’s author’s publisher announced that he was discontinuing several books with racist images, was confused about whether the Mr Potato Head toy would still be a ‘Mr’.
The issue, often discussed more conservatively than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way to animate the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not black like Obama, nor is he a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor is he a Democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, and everyone seems to have grafted him against the demonization by the right-wing attacking machine.
And despite the popularity among the public, every Republican senator opposed the U.S. bailout plan and gave Biden’s team the chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, an associate of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It would be interesting to see how much they benefit from the plan, as opposed to Republicans not voting for the plan. do not have.”
Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: ‘The challenge for Democrats will be as elements of this emerge that will be unpopular, or defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that look like it. as if it is politically very favorable? ”
The OECD predicts that the bailout plan will help the US economy grow by 6.5% this year, which would be the fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair have discovered, all political honeymoon is coming to an end.
Republicans are already investigating a new attack by accusing the president of ignoring the emerging crisis of an increase in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden Sanders thanked for his efforts – is unlikely to endure. And the next important item on the legislative wish list, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.
But it is the U.S. bailout plan and the political struggle 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 making a bet on economic recovery and I hope it’s right because I want the US economy to recover quickly. ‘
But he added: ‘I think people will learn more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulation. There is definitely a real risk of setbacks. ”
Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consultancy, added: ‘We could be on the verge of a new roaring twenties with a booming economy and so much pent-up demand for people to travel and to live and spend money. We can also prepare the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the most important issue that goes into an election, and there is a very high chance that we have a tremendous head or dangers. ‘