Sen. Chris Murphy:
On this historic day, I want to tell you a story about Joe Biden, and what he did behind the scenes to make the historic 2022 gun bill – the first major gun safety legislation in 30 years – a reality.
1/ It starts with a phone call he made to me days after the Uvalde shooting.
2/ After the tragic Uvalde and Buffalo shootings, Biden wanted to give a prime time address to push the Congress to act.
But several of his advisors told him not to waste one of his few prime time speeches on guns. Congress will never pass a gun bill, they told him.
3/ He called me to ask my opinion. In 2013, he and I had sat for hours with the Sandy Hook parents, and parents of kids killed in Hartford and Bridgeport. I knew how personal those families’ pain was to him.
“I want to give this speech, even if a bill is a long shot,” he said.
4/ Days later, he called back and told me he had made up his mind to give the speech – bc he worried if he didn’t, the urgency would dissipate (Congress was on recess that week) and our chance to do something would be lost.
Now, he wanted to go over the details of the address.
5/ He went through the speech with me, line by line, asking what words would spur on or hurt the bipartisan negotiations that had just begun.
Most presidents would send a staffer on this mission. But he was personally invested in getting every line right.
6/ His speech was perfect and deeply impactful. During a week when we could have lost all momentum, Biden’s prime time address helped keep the attention on the issue and pressure on the negotiations.
I’m not sure the historic 2022 gun bill would have passed without that speech.
Franklin Foer wrote a book about Biden recently and spent a lot of time with him. In this piece in the Atlantic he says that Biden’s self-confidence, skill and wisdom led him to have a unexpectedly successful term. (Foer wrote this before those same skills led Biden to make the decision to withdraw, saying they were leading him astray. They didn’t…)
Anyway, this is an excellent short rundown of what will make his legacy historic:
When Biden came to office, pundits liked to cast him as a placeholder—a well-meaning grandpa who would help restore the country’s equilibrium in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s madness. In Biden’s mind, that was just the members of the elite dismissing him, as they always did. Their underestimation stoked his determination to prove himself as one of history’s great men. He privately boasted that his performance would make him worthy of the presidential pantheon that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
With a one-vote majority in the Senate, he audaciously set out to test the limits of what he could accomplish. The American Rescue Plan, passed in the first months of his presidency, pushed social policy in novel directions. It transferred money directly into bank accounts through the child tax credit, the closest the federal government has come to experimenting with universal basic income. For a brief, glorious moment, the legislation helped cut childhood poverty in half.
But the American Rescue Plan was just the early harvest of an exceptionally verdant legislative season. At a moment when Democrats described moderate Republicans as useless toadies, Biden wooed them—and cobbled together bipartisan majorities to pass an infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act. Like Biden, these bills were dismissed as unexciting. But Biden was trying to restore the American state to its postwar glories. Harkening back to Cold War investments in science, the CHIPS bill spends significant cash on research and development, and the infrastructure bill renovates the transit systems, byways of economic competitiveness.
His signature accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, a dreadfully unexciting name for a hugely significant bill. With its subsidies for clean energy, it will be remembered as the first massive American effort to contain climate change. And perhaps just as significantly, it will be remembered as the moment when the nation reembraced industrial policy. That is, the state began using its resources to guarantee the international dominance of American firms in electric vehicles and alternative energies, the industries of the future.
That’s the most surprising part of the Biden presidency. He broke with the economic paradigm that dominated policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Whereas those presidents choked when delivering the praise for unions that party politics demanded, Biden walked the picket line and lent presidential prestige to the movement. He reversed several generations of indifference to the problem of monopoly and installed regulators who went after Big Tech ferociously.
His supreme self-confidence allowed him to buck the conventional wisdom of foreign-policy mandarins. Both Barack Obama and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but only Biden had the courage to actually follow through on that decision—although his chaotic execution of a move that voters overwhelmingly supported eroded confidence in his presidency. A devoted believer in old-fashioned transatlanticism, he plowed money and arms into the defense of Ukraine, as if the future of Europe depended on it. These were bold decisions that a president with lesser experience—and a lesser sense of his own acumen—wouldn’t have had the gumption to make.
Biden hates abstraction and pretension. But in his best moments, he could think like a grand strategist. I once heard him extemporaneously describe everything he had done to counter China, and it was impressive to behold. He deepened America’s entanglement with Australia. He helped mend the long rift between Japan and South Korea, so that they could focus on the shared threat they now faced. He successfully schmoozed Narendra Modi, so that India shifted toward the American sphere of influence. Without receiving much credit, he actually managed the pivot to Asia that Obama first promised.
Over the course of Biden’s term, when the press dismissed him as a failure, he kept pushing forward. He never shifted blame onto his aides—and never fired them to cover his own mistakes. He pushed ambitiously, even though he often did so at the risk of his own humiliation.
Before his age became the source of his political demise, it supplied him with wisdom. Before his stubbornness inured him to the inevitable, it carried him to unlikely triumphs. His response to criticism was to always double down on himself.
And in the end those characteristics led him to the right decision.
