Biden exhibited more faith than the commentariat
Was it groupthink? Being out of touch with “real America”? Pundits visiting the wrong red-state diners? Failure to read the room? Whatever. Once again, the Church of the Savvy misread the country ahead of a general election.
Scranton Joe did not, writes The Atlantic‘s Franklin Foer. Pundits adjudged President Biden’s closing argument on Nov. 3 “head-scratching” and “puzzling.” Biden had the advantage of being right. He asked Americans to save their democracy from authoritarians and they listened. He exhibited, writes Foer, “more faith in the American people than the commentariat or his political adversaries” who thought him naive.
Democrats would pay a price for “cultural extremism,” felt critics. A perceived leftward shift would allow Republicans to retake the suburbs and secure the traditional bounty of congressional seats opposition parties normally win in a president’s first midterm. The Democratic Congress would go the way of Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia, falling to culture war critiques. But Biden believed he could “lower the temperature in the country” by going low-key:
Unlike Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, he has avoided becoming a polarizing figure. By receding a bit more into the background, he has immunized himself against plots to make him into a villain. Even when Trumpists shouted “Let’s go Brandon,” they never really seemed to have their hearts in it. The joke went stale fast. The only scandal that Republicans have pursued with any vigor is the corrupt foreign activity of Hunter Biden. Even that they have tended to describe as a meta-scandal about the media’s failure to cover the wayward son’s purloined laptop.
Biden passed transformational legislation that drew much more fire than “Obamacare” or “Hillarycare.” Lowering the temperature allowed the affable Biden to defang accusations of being a “socialist” or worse. The right flung them, of course, but Americans outside the Beltway and right-wing bubbles weren’t buying it.
C’mon man. It’s Scranton Joe.
It helped that rather than defend himself with facts as other Democrats reflexively would, Biden attacked Republicans as anti-American. Biden enlisted Independence Hall in driving home his argument. Unaccustomed to being on the receiving end, the right howled. The louder they howled, the more the country was having Biden’s conversation, not theirs.
When the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling, Biden spent several weeks on the receiving end of harsh criticism from his own base, who felt that he wasn’t acting aggressively enough to counteract the decision. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pleaded with him to open abortion clinics on military bases and the fringes of national parks. But Biden’s instinct was to resist making himself (or his policies) the center of attention. He didn’t want to propose any executive action that the courts would slap down, or that would offend the sensibilities of moderate voters. His instinct was to step back and let the anger settle on its deserved target, the Republican Party.
Biden calls himself a “fingertip politician”—and it’s the second part of that label that helped him exceed electoral expectations. He’s made strategic choices to protect his coalition, even when those decisions earned him derision. To counteract inflation, or at least how it’s most directly experienced, he’s relentlessly exploited the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down prices at the pump. To win young voters and fulfill a campaign promise to Elizabeth Warren, he agreed to student-debt relief, even if it wasn’t a policy he especially liked.
Critiques of Biden were, Foer argues, “profound political misjudgment.” Biden appealed to Americans’ better angels. His repeated “never bet against America” and “nothing we can’t do if we do it together” lines that sound hackneyed to cynics landed differently outside the Beltway.
Democrats in the lame duck session might want to reality-check their own misjudgments about what sells in Scranton Joe’s America. Read the room, Joe Manchin. Read election results in Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema. Enough Americans have had their fill of crazytown that lowering the temperature by heading off the incoming Republican majority may be better politics than your instincts tell you.
Maybe Biden is not the crazy one.