President Joe Biden is delivering on his campaign promise to govern without Donald Trump’s freewheeling antics, opting for scripted remarks over the former president’s off-the-cuff tweets and frequent sparring sessions with reporters.
While Trump’s critics may appreciate the change of tone and pace, Biden needs to capture the public’s attention if he wants to encourage vaccine skeptics to roll up their sleeves or gin up support for his proposals to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure projects and liberal social welfare programs.
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Biden is in the middle of a countrywide “Back on Track” tour to build momentum around his American Jobs and Families plans, estimated to cost $4 trillion. But at a stop in Virginia this week, his rambling address did little more than provide fodder for Republican operatives to mock him for mistakenly saying “anybody making less than $400,000 a year” would “not pay a single penny in taxes” under his proposals. The plans face an evenly divided Senate, with Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, already opposing their size and scope.
At the same time, Biden’s administration is ramping up its vaccine program to target people hesitant to get their shots. Many of those skeptics are Republican men who dislike listening to government officials in general, let alone the man who replaced Trump in the White House.
Presidential tours rarely change public opinion, according to Lawrence Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.
Biden has so far dropped into Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, key 2022 and 2024 battleground states, since his address to a joint session of Congress last week. His schedule then has him in Louisiana on Thursday. But similarly to his “Help is Here” tour, organized to promote his $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending package’s passage, his appearances have been low key. The most-attended event has been a socially distanced car rally in Atlanta on the 100th day of his presidency, and that was interrupted by protesters.
But these tours can consolidate congressional support and boost public opinion, in part by engaging local news outlets and community partners excited to meet the president on his travels, Jacobs told the Washington Examiner.
“This plays to Biden’s forte — the inside strategy of working Capitol Hill through visits to states and districts, invites to the White House, and constant phone calling,” he said. “Biden’s address to Congress is not the model. It was canned with practice and gifted speechwriters, and it didn’t impact public opinion much.”
The main reason for presidential tours is to drive positive press coverage in states or regions where support for the bill or issue is soft, Rutgers University history and journalism professor David Greenberg agreed. Presidents have been embarking on these tours for decades, even back to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, so they are almost perfunctory, he explained. But they are important to Biden, who complained his old boss, former President Barack Obama, did not take a “victory lap” after he secured an economic relief package in 2009.
For Greenberg, Biden does not “give rip-roaring addresses.” At this stage of his life and in this political environment, he has discovered he is more effective when he keeps a low profile, the professor added.
“Our country is so polarized now that it’s too much to expect he will win over large numbers of Republicans. But if he can get independents, moderates, swing voters, and other less-partisan Americans to support him, he will be doing quite well,” he said.
Biden’s “calm style” was not “in any way inimical to persuading people to get vaccinated,” Greenberg went on.
“When it comes to more controversial and ideology-laden issues, like voting issues or immigration, I think he is going to have a harder time,” he said.
Biden, his aides, and congressional allies have begun negotiating the finer points of his spending plans. They are deciding whether to pursue a smaller, narrower infrastructure deal with Republicans before bundling together social welfare proposals, such as a $309 billion investment for free universal preschool and two years of community college and a $225 billion, 12-week national paid leave program, to fast-track through Congress using the reconciliation budgetary process. Relying on reconciliation means they would not require GOP support.
West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is leading the bipartisan talks for the GOP. Discussions have centered on her initial counteroffer of $568 billion for traditional infrastructure initiatives.
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Biden announced on Tuesday his administration was aiming to vaccinate 70% of adults with at least one COVID-19 shot by July 4 and 160 million adults with two doses in the next two months. He said at the White House he was confident the administration would surpass its new target of essentially 100 million shots in 60 days.
“In one sense, it’s easier in that it’s up to convincing the American people rather than guaranteeing them we’d have a supply for them,” he said. “We’re going to keep at it. And I think, at the end of the day, most people will be convinced by the fact that their failure to get the vaccine may cause other people to get sick and maybe die.”
