Biden's big COVID bill proves a lot of his critics wrong

[catbyte]

How Joe Biden could end up being the most transformative president since FDR

By Heather Digby Parton
March 12, 2021

A new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes about Joe Biden's campaign for president is called "Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency," which seems like an unnecessarily disparaging title about a man who won a decisive popular vote victory in the midst of a global pandemic. But, I guess, that's just the way politics goes these days. I haven't read the book but early reviews focus on the fact that nobody, even Biden's former boss Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (whom the authors call the "vampire in the bullpen" ) thought he had a chance and were, apparently, not afraid to say so. It sounds like the typical campaign book gossip, which is fine as far as it goes, but the truth is that in 2019 I don't think anyone but Biden's family and team thought he was the strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump.

It was assumed that the 2020 campaign would be a bare-knuckled brawl and that the Democrats should put up someone who would relish going toe-to-toe with Trump. It was going to be a very big show and Biden's old school political style didn't have the razzle-dazzle most people thought would be necessary to compete with The Trump Show. But, as we know, everything changed in the first months of 2020 and the world suddenly got very serious. I don't know if the Democratic electorate had some sort of collective instinct or it was, as the title of the book implies, just a matter of luck, but in that moment of great fear and anxiety, Joe Biden, with his years of experience and what felt like calm, compassionate wisdom, rose to the top of the field and eventual victory.

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Last week Bloomberg reported that Biden has quickly reshaped the presidency in his own image as a contrast to his predecessor. And polling shows that the public approves of what they are seeing — a return to a traditional presidency. But that anti-Trump style doesn't mean that Biden simply plans to undo all of Trump's policies so he can restore the Obama legacy. As Bloomberg's Jennifer Epstein puts it, Biden's so far "unobtrusive presidency masks his desire to dramatically reshape the country." While we don't know how possible it's going to be, that appears to be true, and I don't think that's something most of us expected of him. He just doesn't seem like a transformative guy. And maybe that's his secret weapon.

The truth, however, is that we are in a period that would offer this opportunity to any leader who has the guts to pursue it. Republican "small government" ideology is moribund and they have cast their lot with demagoguery and manipulation of the voting system to fill the void. More importantly, many of the economic assumptions that undergirded that ideology have proven to be useless at best and destructive at worst, particularly in a crisis. Zachary D. Carter, the author of "The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes" wrote in the New York Times this week that the only reason the US economy didn't completely collapse this past year is because the government rediscovered Keynes' fundamentals:

An economic crisis demands a confluence of coordination, expertise and judgment that governments alone can provide. If the government gets out of the way, everything falls apart. And when the government gets out of the way for decades, it can transform a manageable emergency into a national calamity.

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/12/bidens-big-covid-bill-proves-a-lot-of-his-critics-wrong/

[comradebillyboy]

1. Back in 2019 I was a Biden skeptic. By the spring of 2020 I was

on the Biden bus. Joe ignored twitter and the media pundits and talking heads. When votes started coming in they came in for Biden. It turns out he had the perfect disposition and demeanor to contrast against Trump. And the pundits, left and right, were shown to be a collection of empty suits.