Joe Biden and the underrated value of winning elections

Joe Biden and the underrated value of winning elections. 

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

March 18, 2021. 

Biden at his inauguration

(Photo by Greg Nash - Pool/Getty Images)

Joe Biden campaigned for president on a sweeping and transformational progressive policy agenda. I know because I covered the 2020 presidential campaign, and part of that coverage was reading about Biden’s policy proposals.

You can read all about it in such Yglesias Takes as:

“Joe Biden has a plan for that: Not a joke, folks — he’s running on a transformative policy agenda” [May 26, 2020]

“Progressives don’t love Joe Biden, but they’re learning to love his agenda” [July 18, 2020]

Then he broke out to a huge lead in the polls, after which the election results turned out to be surprisingly close. Then, contrary to the expectations of most people (but not me), Democrats won the special elections in Georgia. That set the stage for the passage of the American Rescue Plan, which suddenly led to a flourishing of takes about how Biden could be a transformative progressive president.

David Brooks said he could lead a realignment on policy even without a partisan realignment. Dylan Matthews wrote about a second war on poverty. Jordan Weissman said we could be headed for an “FDR-sized” presidency. The Financial Times wrote about “a new era of big government,” and Jeffrey Sachs said Biden could be “the most transformative president in 75 years.”

I both agree with those takes on some level and also want to pump the brakes on them. But most of all, I want to pump the brakes on being surprised. The ARP is, in fact, a big deal piece of legislation. But if you measure it against Biden’s own campaign promises (rather than baseless expectations), it’s fairly modest. Then again, it’s not surprising that a single bill falls far short of the overall agenda. The question of how we will look back on the Biden presidency hinges critically on what happens over the next six months, 18 months, seven years, etc.

But the biggest point I want to make is that all this whiplash is a symptom of a systemic problem. The internet has allowed a much wider circle of people to become hyper-engaged with American politics, which is kind of great. But because it’s more fun to fight with people who are adjacent to you than are wildly different, that’s created a form of political engagement that massively overrates the importance of factional infighting relative to partisan politics. Progressive estimates of Joe Biden are soaring right now, primarily because Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won. Progressive hopes for Barack Obama were dashed largely because Democrats did so poorly in the 2010 midterms. It’s just really good to win and really bad to lose.

ARP: Beginning of the end or end of the beginning?

To the extent that you are just interested in macroeconomic policy and business cycle management, the American Rescue Plan is a conceptual and practical triumph relative to the Obama-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. What makes ARP so great is not just that it’s larger than ARRA, but that it comes on the back of several significant stimulus bills. ARP’s scale, conception, and design represent a much more robust commitment to full employment than we saw back in 2009, and I think that’s great.

But when people talk about the transformative power of ARP, they are really talking about an era of renewed enthusiasm for the welfare state.

I think “the welfare state is really good” is absolutely the correct lesson to learn from the success of the CARES Act, and ARP correctly drives us even further down that model. But if you look at the actual text of the legislation, it doesn’t include any permanent expansions to the welfare state. Instead, it includes a bunch of temporary welfare state expansions (most notably the greatly enhanced Child Tax Credit, but also more generous versions of Obamacare, SNAP, and several other programs) that progressives aspirationally hope to make permanent.

That all sounds completely plausible to me. You can easily tell a story where Democrats use their control over the agenda to force an extension of the temporary CTC increase into the annual tax extenders ritual, do well in the midterms, extend it again, and then after Biden is re-elected in 2024, they sit down with Mitt Romney and transform it into a permanent program by making some concessions toward Romney’s view of how it should work. If that happens, then focusing on LBJ analogies (complete with worrying about foreign policy) makes a lot of sense.

But you can also tell a totally plausible story in which the politics here completely break down. Maybe the economy starts roaring and interest rates rise, so Blue Dogs say we can’t do any deficit-financed extensions of ARP programs. Then things pivot to paying for an extension with tax increases. But even though every single Democrat says they favor that, they still disagree about exactly which taxes should be raised. And Chuck Schumer has zero margin of error in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi has almost no margin of error in the House. So nothing actually gets agreed to. Then Republicans achieve a roughly average result in the midterms, which means capturing both houses of Congress.1 Now with the GOP in charge and the economy healthy, we get a pivot to austerity.

Biden could still be a popular president who wins re-election under that scenario, but we might look back on him as not-especially-consequential. Closer to Bill Clinton than to Obama, who created a major new program.

But note that the difference here between transformative Biden and also-reelected Biden has nothing in particular to do with Biden himself.

Congress sets the domestic agenda

One piece of subtext to the over-enthusiasm about Biden and ARP is that while most Democrats in Congress endorsed a fully refundable Child Tax Credit years ago, Biden actually did not.

Biden, in fact, secured the Democratic Party presidential nomination while hewing to the post-1994 consensus that cash benefits for non-workers are a bad political nonstarter. And it’s probably not a coincidence that one of Biden’s top advisors, Bruce Reed, was a major force both before and during the Clinton administration in favor of that position. Biden, as a guy whose political career goes way back to the 1970s and 1980s, appears to have been fully bought into the welfare politics of the Reagan/Clinton era.

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t running on a big agenda. But the big Biden campaign ideas were for big expansions of in-kind services, most notably a huge increase in federal housing vouchers (paired with zoning reform), a surge in federal funding for poor schools, plus further expansion of the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t until September that Biden hopped on the refundable CTC bandwagon. And making it a temporary thing was not a concession to the realities of the budget reconciliation process or something he needed to do to secure Joe Manchin’s vote — it was baked into his original embrace of the idea.

Then by February or so, things seem to have flipped, both because a lot of progressives got hired to work on the Biden economic team and also because the political success of the stimmy checks legitimately changed people’s views about the politics of cash. It then became the case that the expanded, fully-refundable CTC was temporary in the bill but intended to become permanent. And I think a big dose of the past week’s premature hyping of the historic nature of the Biden presidency is an effort by progressives to talk Biden himself into being enthusiastic about an idea he was a latecomer to.

My bigger point here, though, is that what presidents do on domestic policy is driven by Congress. Not just in the sense that you have to restrain your ambitions to meet the needs of the most moderate caucus members — Congress has enormous (albeit quiet) agenda-setting power. In the 2008 cycle, Obama very clearly signaled that he thought climate and energy were a more important priority than healthcare. But Nancy Pelosi and Max Baucus disagreed, so you got “Obama’s” historic health care bill. Paul Ryan wanted to do ACA repeal, so ACA repeal became Trump’s top priority. Congressional Democrats wanted to get the refundable Child Tax Credit into a new stimulus bill, so Biden did what smart leaders do and “led” in the direction that his party was willing to follow.

Presidential primaries are overrated

I and many other writers spent the whole primary season yelling about this, but all that time spent debating Bernie’s healthcare plan versus Beto’s versus Biden’s was basically wasted time.

The president’s formal power over legislation is limited. But beyond that, the congressional party has a lot of informal influence, because no president (even Trump) really wants to spend his time in nasty intra-party fights. At a minimum, presidents normally want to kick such fights into later in their administration. By 2007, Democrats already held majorities in Congress and Bush couldn’t run for reelection again, so it suddenly made sense to him to try to do an immigration deal that would deeply split his party. But there was just no way he would try that in 2005.

And the same is true even for things that are formally under the president’s control.

You can use executive orders or acting appointments to do things that one or two members of your own party oppose. But the political cost of taking steps that deeply divide your own party would be very high. So while presidents can — and do — take action on issues where they don’t have majority support in Congress, they still are largely bound by the party consensus — especially on domestic issues where members of Congress tend to have strong feelings.

The identity of the president matters, of course. But it matters in somewhat unpredictable ways. Would President Sanders have gotten a bigger relief bill passed by making an even more dramatic request? Or would Senators Manchin, Tester, Sinema, etc. have felt a stronger need to distance themselves from a Sanders administration and forced him to settle for a bipartisan deal? I’m not sure I know which one I think is more likely. And I think that’s true across the board. The policy outputs of different administrations would be different, but I think in unpredictable ways.

It’s genuinely hard to know whose election will lead to exactly which policy outcomes, and you are probably best off selecting someone who you think will do a good job on foreign policy. At the same time, the impact of winning elections tends to be underrated.

It’s really good to win

I live in D.C., so I am very out of touch with real people and how they think. But I am pretty in touch with elite Republicans and professional members of the conservative intellectual infrastructure. Those people all thought it was a disaster when Trump became the nominee because (a) he’s a clown and (b) they thought he’d lose.

But when he won, they mostly found out that it’s good to win the election.

You get a bunch of judges you agree with. You get a tax cut. Your friends run regulatory agencies. It’s good! And obviously, grassroots Republicans liked Trump too. Not, I think, because they were super-enthusiastic about the details of Gorsuch’s jurisprudence. But because Trump’s presence in office owned the libs — which is another way of saying that it’s good to win the election.

Mitt Romney, by contrast, lost the election.

One set of GOP elites likes to say that this shows that Romney was weak whereas Trump is tough, and you need a tough counterpuncher like Trump. Another set of GOP elites likes to whine that Democrats were so mean to Nice Mr. Romney that they were practically begging for a corrupt, racist authoritarian to win the White House.

A more boring truth is that if Romney had copied Trump and promised to eschew Social Security and Medicare cuts while vowing in a non-specific way to deliver a plan to “cover everybody,” he would have easily won the election. These positions are much more popular than the ones Romney ran on. And as a former moderate governor of Massachusetts, Romney would have been a more credible messenger. And Romney, unlike Trump, is not a total scumbag.

But if I took a time machine to December 2011 with the proposition “maybe the GOP should nominate someone who disavows entitlement cuts,” conservative elites would tell me that’s unacceptable — that politics is about issues, not just winning at all costs. But then if I took them with me in a time machine to December 2017, they’d see that conservatives were actually pretty happy with a president who appointed Federalist Society judges, cut taxes, did business-friendly regulation, and kept the left out of power. Yet conservatives could have had this in popular, non-scumbag form had they been a bit more self-aware about the desirability of winning.

This is how I feel about progressive enthusiasm for ARP. It mostly just reflects that when Democrats have a majority, good things happen. So rank-and-file progressives should adjust their expectations and get more excited about winning.

Here’s the part where I repeat myself

Recall that for a while, progressives whipped themselves into a state of outrage over Joe Biden’s reluctance to endorse repealing the Hyde Amendment and letting Medicaid fund abortions. This successfully got him to change his position. And that, in turn, probably cost him a few votes somewhere or other. And it is not going to lead to Hyde Amendment repeal. But Biden winning the election was good news for abortion rights.

Democrats winning races in North Carolina, Iowa, and Montana would have been even better news (allowing for some margin of error on judicial nominations), and that would be true even if the nominees in those races had taken moderate positions on abortion that angered choice activists.

And on down the line it goes. If Democrats manage to retain control of Congress, policy will keep evolving in a progressive direction, and progressives will find plenty to cheer and be happy about (not be satisfied with or complacent about). But if they lose control, policy will swing rightward and progressives will be mad. Will ARP programs become permanent features of the welfare state or just a stimulus blip? The stakes are incredibly high. Vast takes about the transformative nature of the Biden presidency hang almost exclusively on this point. That’s worth fighting for, which means it’s worth trimming your sails on other points for.