If President Joe Biden were wiser and more honest, he would reboot his presidency to govern as he campaigned: a man of the center-left, eager to work with Republicans in the name of national unity.
Throughout the Democratic nomination campaign, Biden presented himself as the candidate who believed “we have to reach across the aisle, get things done. No other way to get anything done in this country.” During the general election campaign and in his inaugural address, he repeated the word “unity” as a mantra that would solve almost every ill while insisting he would “be a president for Democrats and Republicans” — for all voters rather than just his party’s hardliners.
Yes, Biden made clear he was liberal — but he pretended to hold more centrist views, rather than hard-leftist, personal inclinations.
Yet, there is not a single major policy area in which Biden has attempted to govern from the political center. Likewise, he has made no effort to work with Republicans. Rather, he tries to steamroll them.
This failure is important not just to assuage gauzy “let’s play nice” sensibilities. It’s important for the very reasons to which Biden gave (insincere) lip service. This nation’s political system has become dangerously polarized, full of anger and mistrust, and astonishingly loath to compromise. The vast majority of the public now believes the system doesn’t work.
Indeed, many believe it cannot work without a radical, extra-systemic purge, either of basic constitutional norms or of whichever group each citizen believes to be “the other side.”
The political system desperately needs a return to what once was considered normal. Lawmakers battled over very real and significant differences, but they also stayed within certain ideological and procedural limits. They did not give off the sense that each political battle is Armageddon. When the bulk of the electorate is close to giving up entirely on the political system, that’s a crisis.
All of which is a long introduction to this question: How, indeed, would Biden act if he really wanted to govern as he campaigned — as a semi-moderate?
To be clear, none of the following agenda choices would please me or other conservatives, but they would have a strong chance of bipartisan (albeit grudging) supermajority support in Congress. Better still, they would reassure voters that a sensible center can run the nation’s Capitol.
They also would tacitly recognize that when a president is in an office — who won by a grand total of fewer than 43,000 votes in three states, while both the Senate and the House are almost exactly equally divided — the voters have indicated they want consensus-building, not harshly ideological agendas.
On immigration, with the Supreme Court ruling that former president Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy must remain in place, Biden would push a deal. Republicans would get a slimmed-down RIM arrangement codified, plus the expansion of border walls in areas even Democrats once supported (but nowhere near as extensive as Trump wanted), plus a streamlined deportation system.
Biden’s Democrats would finally get written into law at least a modest version of amnesty for children of well-settled illegal immigrants, plus an amped-up process for awarding legal “green cards” for migrant workers. There would also be a major effort to streamline the legal immigration process and admit more who seek long-term legal status.
On spending and infrastructure, Biden would shut out his party’s left-wing and the Republican right-wing by offering a grand bargain: jettison most (but not all) of the proposed $3.5 trillion social-spending package. It would still keep most (but not all) of the $1 trillion-plus “infrastructure” bill, upon agreement by Senate Republicans not to filibuster any of it.
On energy policy, Biden would reallow domestic drilling that he currently has blocked (but which courts may not let him permanently kill), while reopening the Keystone Pipeline. From Republicans, though, he would exact agreement not to fight or filibuster some subsidies for “clean energy” and regulations fervently desired by his own party’s eco-Left.
In all these cases, the end result would be policy clearly to the Left of where Trump left it, but well within the mainstream of U.S. politics.
In short, Biden would do what Bill Clinton did to save his presidency after Democrats suffered disastrous midterm elections in 1994, except with a somewhat more liberal tilt: play the middle against both extremes. Clinton called it “triangulating.” It worked like a charm for him until his corruption and libido short-circuited his command of political Washington.
Conservatives (myself included) would oppose most of these bargains and chafe when Biden achieves them. Yet, he would probably achieve them. Meanwhile, the very attempt to govern from somewhere near the center would be good for the U.S. political system.
