Fresh from redefining the word “recession,” President Joe Biden may be on the verge of doing the same with “leadership.”
Shortly after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) restarted the Democratic legislative parade, Biden decided to park his float at the front.
There was no shortage of commentators ready to make Biden the grand marshal.
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“Listen, if you just erase the past six months of nutty stuff, it looks like you’ve got a president that can get an infrastructure bill done, get COVID stuff done, get something done for the American people on climate, get something done on CHIPS — that’s a successful presidency, you just have the past six months of nonsense that takes away from it,” declared CNN commentator Van Jones.
“After enduring a brutal year dominated by economic angst, legislative setbacks, and sinking approval ratings, the president is suddenly on the verge of a turnaround that, the White House believes, could salvage his summer — and alter the trajectory of his presidency,” wrote Politico’s John Harris in a piece titled “Wait, Is Biden A Better President Than People Thought?”
The trouble with Building Back Biden because Manchin cut a deal with the top Senate Democrat and Congress was able to pass a bipartisan semiconductors bill is that this flurry of legislative activity occurred after Biden (whose governing experience from 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president was a major selling point in 2020) largely excused himself from the proceedings.
“The White House had much earlier left Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to negotiate with Manchin over how to assemble a bill the West Virginia centrist could support,” the Washington Post reported less than two weeks before the Manchin-Schumer deal was announced. “White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain has long been skeptical about the potential for a deal with Manchin, according to three people with direct knowledge of his private remarks.”
“The White House is steaming mad at Joe Manchin. Again,” Politico reported shortly afterward.
Asked during his Saudi Arabia trip whether Manchin had negotiated in good faith, Biden replied, “I didn’t negotiate with Joe Manchin. I have no idea.”
All these comments came after Manchin pulled the plug on Biden’s more sweeping climate and social welfare plans, seemingly for the last time. Translation: We’ll hold our fire as Schumer talks with Manchin, but don’t blame us when the negotiations fail.
Manchin specifically blamed the White House for the failure of the then-$1.75 trillion reconciliation bill late last year, though he tried to exempt Biden himself. “The bottom line is … it’s staff. It’s staff purely. … It’s not the president,” Manchin said. “It’s staff. And they drove some things and put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable.”
On cue, Biden’s then-press secretary Jen Psaki issued the White House’s most scathing public statement on Manchin to date, accusing the West Virginian of a “sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.”
Psaki’s successor seemed surprised this week that the latest Manchin bill existed. “So, I’m standing here; I haven’t seen this for myself,” Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a White House briefing. “I need to talk to our folks on this. So I don’t want to get ahead of the team here.”
These latest developments are also a repudiation of Biden’s legislative strategy. He sought to pass the bulk of the Democratic agenda through reconciliation. So far, this has produced exactly one major piece of legislation — the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan that became Biden’s biggest contribution to the inflation threatening his presidency.
If this second reconciliation bill passes, its price tag will be down to less than half a trillion. Progressives had initially hoped for $6 trillion. Biden originally asked for $3 trillion despite a 50-50 Senate hinging on the votes of his least liberal senators.
The infrastructure plan, the gun legislation, and the semiconductors bill all passed on a bipartisan basis, especially in the Senate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted for all three of them, though he will face questions about the Democrats’ reconciliation revival. This was clearly a viable path for Biden to rack up legislative accomplishments earlier in his term, yet he chose to keep backing bills that he couldn’t even get Manchin to support.
This was rooted in a contradiction in Biden’s 2020 campaign. He promised suburban voters he would be a bipartisan deal-maker. He told the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that he’d be a transformational progressive president on the order of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Biden was inevitably going to disappoint one group of voters. His greatest feat was disappointing them both. If the Democratic coalition holds together behind Manchin-Schumer, it will largely be because they know that after November, they may not get another chance for the rest of Biden’s term.
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Of course, Biden has long chased the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. This has led to his dalliances with segregationists and socialists alike over the years.
It’s an approach that may let one more significant bill reach Biden’s desk before the midterm elections. Transformative leadership, it is not.
