Professor Peter Dreier wrote this for TPM cafe and I think it’s spot on:
Whomever wrote Biden’s speech gets an A. It was essentially a laundry list of progressive ideas — but it didn’t feel like a laundry list because it included lots of morally uplifting transitions and personal connections, despite a handful of clichés about “America can do anything if we work together.”
The President delivered it with passion and without verbal slip-ups. He made the most of the occasion. A CNN poll found that 71% of viewers said that the speech made them feel more optimistic about the country’s direction.
Biden’s ideas — on voting rights, prescription drug prices, health-care reform (getting closer to Medicare for All, but not quite), immigration (including embracing the DREAM Act), workers’ rights and labor law reform, the $15 minimum wage, gun control, addressing violence against women, pre-school, free community colleges and increased Pell grants for college students, climate change and green jobs, combatting racial profiling by police and “systemic racism” (is this the first time a President has used that phrase in a speech to Congress?), U.S. relations with Russia and China, child care, paid family and medical leave, pay equality for women, infrastructure, confronting COVID-19, LGBT equality (“To all transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave, I want you to know, your President has your back”), raising taxes on the 1% (families with incomes over $400,000) and big corporations, and more — were far to the left of anything an American president has proposed in recent history. In March, Biden signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. A few weeks ago he released his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan. Wednesday night he added another $1.8 trillion in new spending for workers, families, and children.
That’s a lot. And who knows if he will be able to much of it passed but damn, think of the positive consequences for the American people if he does.
Dreier addresses the common comparison with FDR:
Many commentators will compare Wednesday’s address to several speeches that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave outlining his bold and pathbreaking New Deal agenda. In 1932, FDR beat the incumbent, Republican Herbert Hoover, with 57.4% of the vote. Although FDR ran for president in the midst of the worst economic disaster in America’s history, he did not campaign on a platform of progressive ideas. He was cautious and vague about his plans. His New Deal agenda evolved between his election in November and his inauguration in March 1933. A growing wave of mass protest — by workers, the jobless, farmers, consumers, and students — provided a backdrop to FDR’s increasing willingness to adopt progressive policies, including Social Security, a wide-ranging public jobs program, the minimum wage, the right of workers to unionize, unemployment insurance, subsidies to struggling farmers, the 8-hour workday, tough regulations on banks, a rural electrification plan, and public housing, among others. Getting his New Deal agenda through Congress was only possible because the Democrats had an overwhelming 60-36 majority in the Senate and a 311-117 majority in the House of Representatives — margins that increased in the 1934 mid-term election.
Biden took office in the midst of a double-whammy of an unprecedented COVID epidemic and the resulting worst economy since the Depression. Like FDR, he was viewed as a centrist, particularly compared with other candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He beat the incumbent Republican Donald Trump with only 51.3% of the popular vote and 57% (306-232) of the Electoral College vote in an election that, despite the pandemic and efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote, saw one of the largest turnouts (66.7%) in modern history. But in contrast to the Roosevelt election of 1932, Biden’s political party won a narrow majority in the House (222-213), while splitting the Senate 50-50, an even divide only made possible at the last minute by the surprise victory of two Democrats in Georgia. In a highly polarized Senate, only the tie-breaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris gives Biden any breathing room, assuming he can persuade all 50 Democrats to support his legislative agenda.
So, is Biden destined for failure? Maybe. But not necessarily:
First, Biden’s progressive agenda, including those points he outlined in his Wednesday speech, is made possible by a new surge of energy on the Left. Included in that resurgence are the campaigns of Sanders and Warren, as well as other prominent leftists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the wave of activism by groups including Indivisible, the labor movement, the 2017 women’s march, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, that changed the national political debate and pushed the Democratic Party to the left. It was also made possible by the 2018 “blue wave” election and the 2020 victories of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. (Kudos to Stacey Abrams). Despite the narrow Democratic margins in the House, the Progressive Caucus — with close to 100 members — is larger than it has ever been. Moreover, last year voters catapulted a growing number of progressives into office for mayor, city council, district attorney, county sheriff, state legislature, and other bodies, including more than 100 members of Democratic Socialists of America.
Second, Sanders or Warren could have given Biden’s speech. They would have pushed further — a wealth tax and Medicare for All, for example — but Biden has embraced most of what these two progressive icons proposed during last year’s campaign. But had either of them won the Democratic primary and then the presidency, it is highly doubtful that they could have gotten the traction that Biden has gotten. (I say this as someone who supported Bernie in 2016 and Warren in 2020 and was initially skeptical of Biden.) Paradoxically, Biden is a better messenger for this progressive agenda than Sanders and Warren because he was not viewed as a progressive. As a result he has the kind of power of evangelical preachers who say, “I was once a sinner like you and now I’ve been saved.” Smartly, Biden doesn’t acknowledge his transformation. He just lets people see him evolve.
Third, much of Biden’s appeal and success so far is due to being the opposite of Trump. Most Americans were exhausted by four years of having a narcissistic, corrupt, and white supremacist president who cared little about governing and viewed the White House as a subsidiary of his business operation. Biden evokes “normalcy,” although nothing he has proposed is normal.
Still, there are landmines. Dreier points out that there are members of the left who will not be satisfied regardless and if one of the little royals (Manchin, Sinema, Kelley…) decide to block all this, the entire party will be derided as a failure by both sides no matter how popular the agenda is. He’s right about that, unfortunately. The media will play a big role in that as well.
He also wonders if this current schism between corporate America and the newly minted “populist” right (aka “racist”) GOP portends a bigger and more significant fracture on the right. I wonder about that too. And, there is the Trump effect as well. Who knows where that’s going?
I think Biden is doing the right thing. It’s worth a try. Obama had the opportunity, with a much bigger majority in the congress and much greater support in the country and he banked his first term on getting GOP support and the “Grand Bargain” style rather than pushing through a real progressive agenda. Maybe he had to do that for a variety of reasons. But Biden is going another way. He seems to have learned over all those years in the government that you don’t get anywhere by going small or trying to appease the unappeasable. And right now, the GOP is unappeasable so he might as well shoot the moon.
I think the next hundred days are going to be very interesting. I have no predictions. I’m just hoping for the best.