“What took Biden so long to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement?” I posted to a left-leaning local Facebook group. “Should I perceive an incipient stab in the back and start searching for a 2024 primary challenger?” A few did not get the joke.
In fact, before dinnertime on Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order for the U.S. to rejoin. Another order cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline. There was a stack of orders (Down To Business) prepared for signature by the end of his first day.
One upside of the global pandemic was the elimination of all those frivolous inaugural balls that get in the way of getting down to business. The Biden Inaugural Committee took its celebration largely online like the DNC convention before it. Both were an improvement on the usual pomp and nonsense. Four years of Trump tweets, a year in quarantine, 400,000 Americans dead, and an attempt to overthrow the government have blessed us with fresh perspective.
With so much mess for Biden to clean up and so many crises, some on the left will be primed, as always, to be stiffed by a president not progressive enough for their tastes. They will look for any early signal Biden has sold them out, stabbed them in the back, or whatever. Give the guy a break. You don’t want his job.
One example (CNN):
Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.
The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.”
Team Biden will have to start from scratch, “sources” say.
Maybe that is the new administration lowering expectations that Biden will be able to deliver on his pledge to see 100 million Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 in his first 100 days. Already there are signs it will be a tough hill to climb. But given the Trump administration’s incompetence, its long aversion to admitting the coronavirus was a serious problem, and its efforts to sabotage the incoming administration, maybe that’s not just CYA on Team Biden’s part.
But getting right to work on Wednesday was an admission of how much there is to mitigate as well as work that needs doing in the next year while Democrats control both houses of Congress. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes that getting control of the pandemic and mitigating its economic fallout come first. Biden has had time to recognize the mistakes the Obama administration made in not moving faster while it had its maximum leverage:
Instead of seeking to change Americans’ behavior with subtle technocratic nudges, as Barack Obama’s team did, Biden should aim to make his signature policies as stupidly straightforward as possible. Instead of threading the needle of deficit neutrality, as his predecessor did, he should make a strong case to blow out the budget immediately to fill the hole left by the pandemic recession. Where the Obama administration’s approach was too often clever and strewn with budgetary wonkiness, the Biden formula should embrace the opposite: big, fast, and simple.
“Awesomeness matters,” Thompson writes. While Republicans under Trump tried to leverage relief efforts to their advantage for the fall elections, Biden must get help to people now because it is the right thing to do:
For non-mysterious reasons, polls show extraordinary support for giving $2,000 to every American household as a kind of stimulus-qua-consolation gift for making it through the year from hell (one study indicated that seven in 10 Republicans support the direct payments). With stimulus checks, Biden could endear himself to the persuadable middle of the U.S. electorate, which might enjoy liking an American president, for once.
And for once Democrats, if they can deliver, need to remind Americans again and again, loudly and proudly, just who helped them while Republicans sat on their hands or wrung them over born-again deficit-hawkism.