When Joe Biden was elected, many liberals’ best hope was that he would be a transitional president, an old-school Democratic bridge to a further-left future. Now, the word they are increasingly using is “transformational.”
Biden even huddled with historians in the East Room last month to talk about how important presidents achieved big changes in the past. The implication was clear: Biden was studying Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson because he wanted to be in the same league as his most successful liberal predecessors.
Pundits and reporters got the message. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that Biden was “being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to LBJ and FDR aplenty.” CNN described his $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan as “big, bold and progressive” — and introduced with an eye on history.
As the Biden agenda quickly adds up to repeated multitrillion-dollar spending packages, some are even speculating that the 46th president could be bigger than former President Barack Obama.
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Not long ago, it would have seemed heretical. Obama’s 53% of the popular vote in 2008 remains the higher watermark for Democratic presidential candidates, dating back to when Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964, even if Biden’s raw vote total was the highest in history.
Former President Donald Trump once claimed that Biden’s national ambitions were over until Obama “took him off the trash heap.” It certainly looked that way after Biden won less than 1% of the vote in a fifth-place Iowa caucus showing in 2008, 20 years after a previous presidential campaign, he didn’t even make it that far.
Yet, Dowd contrasted Biden’s FDR ambitions with the man he served for eight years as vice president, writing, “Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.” Axios reported that Biden “loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Biden’s stimulus-style spending spree was bigger at $1.9 trillion to Obama’s $787 billion. His infrastructure bid is also bigger and will be followed by another round of spending in the coming weeks.
The president proclaimed his was “a vision not seen through the eyes of Wall Street or Washington, but through the eyes of hardworking people.” He said it amounted to “a once-in-a-generation investment in America,” one that “builds a fair economy that gives everybody a chance to succeed.” Biden promised the “largest American jobs investment since World War II.”
“Is it big? Yes,” Biden continued. “Is it bold? Yes. And we can get it done.”
Democratic operatives acknowledge a lot will depend on what happens in Congress, where Biden’s majorities are smaller than Obama’s.
“We will have to wait and see what gets passed,” said Democratic strategist Stefan Hankin. “The $1.9 trillion package was a great first step. If the infrastructure bill and the next one pass, Biden will definitely be up there with LBJ as most transformative president — or, said better, the president overseeing the most transformation.”
The pandemic and its economic fallout might give Biden an opening that his more recent Democratic predecessors lacked, noted a second party strategist. Obama had similar aspirations. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he once remarked. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”
There was little doubt that Obama wanted to be more like a liberal Reagan than Clinton or Nixon.
Biden and Obama are by all accounts personally friendly, with the vice presidency creating the former’s path to the White House. But there were tensions over their different styles and temperaments. Obama supported Hillary Clinton rather than giving his vice president any encouragement to run in 2016. Obama did not endorse Biden last year until he had effectively secured the nomination.
“Who could have guessed that Obama’s greatest contribution would be his and his staff’s conspicuous eye rolls at Biden in meetings, followed by his support for Hillary over him in 2016?” tweeted Ryan Grim of the Intercept, a left-wing website.
This has required Biden to abandon much of his Washington institutionalist inclinations, such as his support for the filibuster, which he is now open to reforming or discarding. But many suburban voters cast their ballots for him precisely because they hoped he would be more of a centrist Democrat. Additionally, some picked Biden in the Democratic primaries because they detected Bernie Sanders’s implicit criticism of Obama, who remains revered in the party.
Biden has continued to maintain that his policies have more support among rank-and-file Republicans than the party’s elected officials. “I think Republican voters are going to have a lot to say about it,” he told reporters on Friday when asked about GOP opposition to his infrastructure plan.
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“What is amazing is how the GOP, especially the seven or so moderates, are just choosing to sit on the sidelines, while 70%-plus of Americans approve of what is happening,” Hankin said.
Biden beat the man who said Obama saved him from the trash heap. Obama’s legacy could be next.
