Nearly 100 days into his administration and several trillions of dollars in proposed federal spending later, President Joe Biden is starting to tap the brakes on the whims of the left wing of his party.
Biden is on board with big spending bills and transformative presidency talk but is going slower on cultural flashpoints such as guns and immigration than some Democrats would prefer. The White House sounded an uncertain trumpet on packing the Supreme Court with new liberal justices and getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
This could set up a fight that will define Biden’s presidency. In his Democratic convention speech, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich made an appeal to fellow Republicans who “couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They believe he may turn sharp left and leave them behind.”
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“I don’t believe that,” Kasich responded. “I know the measure of the man.” The next few weeks will determine whether the high-profile GOP Biden endorser was right.
There was an obvious tension in Biden’s appeal in last year’s presidential campaign. He needed to turn out liberals who stayed home, backed the Green Party, or even voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But he also needed to continue the Democrats’ inroads in the suburbs, winning over college-educated, affluent voters who often supported Republicans in the past.
On the trail, Biden talked about bipartisanship. Even in the Democratic primaries, he gently distanced himself from defunding the police while lower-tier candidates talked about “white fragility” and transgender abortions.
“I beat the socialist,” Biden told a Wisconsin radio station. “That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
But the socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, pledged to work with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” to make Biden’s “the most progressive administration” since that of Franklin Roosevelt. Since the election, Biden has embraced some of this talk himself.
By going big on spending and embracing expansive definitions of what constitutes infrastructure or COVID-19 relief but going slower on issues that poll less well or motivate conservative voters to turn out, Biden is betting he can keep these liberals in the fold without immediately triggering the kind of backlash that cost Bill Clinton and Barack Obama control of Congress in their first midterm elections.
The president has less margin for error than either of his most recent Democratic predecessors did. The Senate is split 50-50, with Democrats owing their control to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. The Democratic majority in the House is down to just six seats. The party started the Obama and Clinton presidencies with roughly three-fifths majorities in both chambers, losing dozens of House seats in their first midterm elections.
Public polling so far supports Biden’s delicate dance. His overall job approval rating is high. Voters appear supportive of his American Rescue Plan and American Jobs Plan, though the devil is in the details. Two of the issues where Biden wants to go slow, guns and immigration, are where his numbers are worst. This could be a sign that his approach is correct or a warning of what will happen if he pleases neither side.
“Progressives may not be getting everything they want from Joe Biden, but they’re getting everything they need,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “Progressives want the president to be more aggressive on some issues. But for the most part, Biden has exceeded the expectations they had for the candidate who ran as a moderate.”
This includes the all-important matters of spending and war. “He has aggressively mobilized the federal government to fight the deadly pandemic and to revitalize the ailing economy,” Bannon added. “The president’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was a big hit with the Sanders-wing of the party.”
During the campaign, another Democratic strategist put it this way to Politico: “There is a conversation that’s going on on Twitter that they don’t care about. They won the primary by ignoring all of that. The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional Left that has taken over places like the New York Times.”
Even so, top Democratic operatives concede that they lost votes from conservative Hispanics and other blocs over defunding the police and socialism, despite the top of the ticket’s dismissal of that branding. Conservative groups are already linking Biden to the most left-wing elements of his party.
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“Democrats ratcheted up their embrace of the Left’s radical agenda this week as a prominent House progressive advocated for eliminating the police and incarceration, a House committee approved a D.C. statehood bill, and Democrats in both chambers unveiled a bill to rig the Supreme Court in their favor,” said America Rising’s Whitney Robertson in a summary of recent Democratic legislation.
The question remains whether Biden, who has spent decades navigating the internal politics of the Democratic Party, has the temperament or inclination to resist the Left — and whether his presidency will succeed if he spends political capital trying.
