The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
“The Biden we elected is more than we expected!”
This is not my attempt at senior hip-hop: It is a little ditty that ran through my head as I worked out the other day, and caught myself thinking about the full dimensions of Joe Biden’s ambitions. He may have been Barack’s partner, but Joe is beginning to look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s successor.
While the new president contemplates enacting historic programs, supporters and opponents alike advise him to give the highest priority to compromising. With whom? Yes, perhaps there are as many as six GOP senators who might if the timing is right, under certain circumstances, in a limited way, consider some parts of his program. That’s not a lot to work with even if it were the smart thing to do.
If Mitch McConnell had one more vote in his pocket, and the GOP still controlled the Senate, the term compromise would be immediately banned like references to climate change in Trump’s White House.
I write this with regret having served in a different era when we were governed by public officials who bargained and passed historic legislation. It is hard to pinpoint when all that changed — perhaps when Newt Gingrich ousted a sitting speaker on a phony charge, and then proudly justified the action by declaring that politics is war!
Next came a long period of legislative constipation when money and the corporations took over, turbocharged by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that equated money and free speech. With Congress out to lunch, presidents resorted to governing by executive order, or if you prefer, fiat.
The first rule of governing is to never waste a crisis. One of politics’s great paradoxes is that terrible moments frequently allow leaders to overstep traditional roles and enact programs that would be otherwise impossible. Today is such a time in a divided America. For the past several years, dangerous demagogues in search of power and money have dined out on the worst lies the internet could bring to our tables.
Biden must somehow destroy those elements and restore our spirit while simultaneously rescuing our physical health by shutting down a virus that has killed more Americans than World War I and World War II combined. Working on a parallel track, he must put the unemployed to work, get children back to school, small businesses back in the black, create new insurance for the sick, find urgent solutions to climate change and restore belief in our justice system. How’s your week looking?
Biden’s opening gambit is a whopping $1.9 trillion relief package designed to provide oxygen to the middle-class economy and nourishment for the national spirit. Impressively, it reaches into every part of the American economy and culture.
Next will come an infrastructure program of Rooseveltian proportions setting new directions for future generations. All of this Biden must do immediately while assured of majorities in the House and Senate, replicating the flurry of activity which characterized FDR’s first 100 days in office. Delay would be disastrous for the majority of Americans who have less than $500 in savings and bills to pay. As the investor class thrives, millions of American families are hanging on by the precarious thread of hope a down-to-earth leader has given them.
Political life comes in cycles, and for the last half-century American government has been largely controlled by conservative ideology and resistance to much- vilified government regulation. But movements wear out and plunge into kookiness.
Sadly, this is the fate of today’s GOP. Fearing for their own survival, it has turned in ugly directions by trying in every way to deprive the majority from voting. They have no intention of compromising in any manner that would improve the president’s standing. Like Washington and Lincoln and yes Roosevelt, Joe Biden will have to lead an army of ordinary citizens. I’m signing up.
