Biden’s governance secret: Less is more
Washington Post
How Biden is different from — and similar to — Trump
President Biden waves upon returning to the White House after a visit Wednesday to Arlington National Cemetery. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
On Wednesday, Politico’s AM Playbook opened with a venting of the spleen from GOP Hill staffers. These aides worked for one of the “Group of 10″ senators who have said they were willing to work with President Biden but have yet to actually do so. They are frustrated that Biden stiff-armed their outreach during the coronavirus emergency bill and are sure the same thing will happen again on infrastructure. (They may well be right.)
One staffer laments that standard Republican tactics to hurt Biden have not really worked: “‘Biden is a horrible villain for us,’ said the G-10 staffer, meaning not that he was an actual villain but that he was difficult to villainize. ‘There are deeply entrenched narratives that have some truth but are no longer totally true. Reporters believe them despite all evidence to the contrary.’”
The GOP Hill staffer has half a point. Biden’s presidential style does evoke some deja vu about Donald Trump. As president, the one thing Trump was assiduous about was courting the GOP base. They had reasons to be skeptical that a thrice-married New York socialite who did not sound like a standard conservative Republican would cater to their views. As unconventional as Trump was as president, however, he catered to his base.
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Biden has done something similar with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Biden was most definitely not their guy when he won the nomination. Since his inauguration, however, there has been story after story about the Biden White House’s cultivation of liberals. Writing in the Atlantic, Anand Giridharadas acknowledges that he was “skeptical of Biden” but recognizes that “a president associated with the politics of austerity is spending money with focused gusto, a crisis isn’t going to waste, and Senator Bernie Sanders is happy.”
This has been reflected in the polling on Biden, too. Last month Gallup showed Biden with 96 percent support from Democrats — a figure higher than Republican support for Trump at any time during his presidency. This is not just an artifact of Gallup, either. As the New York Times’s Lisa Lerer and Giovanni Russonello report, “In separate polls released on Wednesday by Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University, Mr. Biden’s approval was at 95 percent and 94 percent among members of his own party.”
Weirdly, Biden is better at being Trump than Trump ever was. He is catering to his base with big liberal policies. That is reflected in his polling, which if anything is more stable and rock-solid than Trump’s. So why is the media narrative about Biden so different?
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For one thing, as my Post colleague Dave Weigel has written, Biden simply has not generated the same reactionary social movement that the past two presidents have: “Although shutdowns have ended in red states where the president is least popular, and although traditional campaigning has returned, there’s none of the mass organizing that confronted Trump or [Barack] Obama. That has been a shock to liberals.”
Why has Biden not been as polarizing as Trump despite similar tactics? There are two reasons for Biden’s more buoyant brand of leadership. The first is banal but true: Biden has prioritized the issues of concern to the broad majority of Americans and adopted popular positions in those areas. Most Americans are concerned about the economy and the pandemic, and hey, guess what Biden has focused on? Even in foreign policy, Biden’s emphasis on rebuilding alliances and push to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan are pretty popular.
Doing popular things in areas the public cares about might seem like basic politicking, but previous presidents have not necessarily gone that route. Trump in particular would get distracted with needless fights. Indeed, some Trump critics became convinced that he was doing this strategically to distract Americans from his more unpopular policies. Not true! As it turns out, Biden’s impulse control has been better than his predecessor’s.
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The other reason this has worked is that so far Biden’s base wants different things than Trump’s base, and those things are more popular in general. Trump’s base wanted substantive policies on immigration and judicial appointments, but mostly they wanted to own the libs. Biden’s base does not possess warm and fuzzy feelings about the #MAGA crowd, but they have prioritized government spending that benefits a broad swath of Americans. The #MAGA crowd is not thrilled with all of Biden’s infrastructure spending, but I’ll bet they will not mind spending on rural broadband.
As Weigel notes, this has also permitted Biden to cut a lower profile than Trump did, to the point where GOP senators talk about it like it’s a bad thing:
If this is the GOP’s best line of attack, then their Hill staffers are going to be frustrated for the next two years.
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