Early in their Presidencies, when their Administrations are all about potential and the disappointments of political reality have not yet set in, many recent American leaders have been showered in speculative glory. Barack Obama was the object of such adulation at home and overseas that he won a Nobel Peace Prize after less than ten months in office. Other new Presidents have elicited favorable comparisons with their predecessors while still lacking much of a record of their own. When Bill Clinton came to the White House, in 1993, at the age of forty-six, he was the youngest Democrat to win the office since J.F.K., and was often likened to Kennedy; his political advisers shrewdly circulated a photograph of a young Clinton shaking J.F.K.’s hand. Even Donald Trump, a sui-generis American President if ever there was one, was the subject of endless, if strained, comparisons to the modern conservative icon Ronald Reagan, from whom he lifted the “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Joe Biden is no exception. Not even a hundred days into his tenure, Biden is being hailed as an aspiring modern-day F.D.R. or L.B.J. who will lead the country out of crisis. Following the passage of his $1.9-trillion COVID-relief package, in March, Biden self-consciously channelled not only F.D.R. and L.B.J. but also Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate-highway system and Kennedy’s space program when he promised, this week, to spend trillions more on legacy-making plans to renovate America’s infrastructure, combat climate change, and reinvent the economy. “It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden said on Wednesday, in Pittsburgh, announcing his proposal. “It is a once-in-a-generation investment in America.”
The early hype surrounding a Presidency is rarely reflective of how things turn out, of course. Proposing historic legislation and passing it are entirely different matters, after all, and who knows where the world will be at the end of Biden’s term, in early 2025. Cautionary tales in recent history abound. Consider that, until the latest round of renewed interest in his domestic policies, L.B.J. has been more often remembered for the debacle of Vietnam than for his Great Society program of progressive reforms. And that Clinton’s comparison to J.F.K. looks a lot different in the #MeToo era than it did in the early nineties. In the wake of Trump’s reëlection defeat and the disastrous end of his Presidency, fewer Republicans today compare him to their hero Reagan. Instead, it is liberal critics who more often seem to do so now, seeing in the forty-fifth President’s takeover of the Republican Party a logical, if tragic, result of many of the forces unleashed and encouraged by Reagan’s self-styled nineteen-eighties “revolution.”
As for Biden, what I’m struck by is not so much the quite possibly overheated F.D.R. and L.B.J. comparisons as the radically different political circumstances that Biden faces in getting Congress to enact his sweeping big-government proposals. Yes, Trump was the first Republican incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and House since Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover, in 1932. But almost everything else about the politics of today appears to be radically different for the new Biden Administration than it was for Roosevelt, from the nature and scale of the economic problems that he faces—the Great Depression was not just worse than our current predicament but much worse—to the realities of governing. The biggest difference is in Washington, where Biden will be trying to push through his agenda with the votes of only fifty senators and a House margin of only three votes. In 1933, by contrast, F.D.R. was working with a Congress in which Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the House three to one; in the Senate, they had a fifty-nine-vote majority. L.B.J.’s hand was even stronger; after his landslide election victory, in 1964, Democrats controlled sixty-eight seats in the Senate and picked up an additional thirty-six seats in the House, giving them two hundred and ninety-five seats and a sizable majority.
What a contrast with today. The truth, which the savvy hands in the Biden White House know all too well, is that the enemy gets a vote, as the military saying goes. In this case, it will get a lot of votes, because there is just no getting around the reality of near-parity between the parties in Congress. As the bills are hashed out on the Hill over the coming months, every faction of even one or two or three members will get a say, knowing that an entire bill could go down with just their votes. The lobbying that has already begun suggests a tough road ahead.
Moderate Democrats are not sold on the tax increases with which Biden has said he will fund the huge infrastructure bill. Republicans, so far, appear to be largely in lockstep with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader who declared the Biden plan a “Trojan horse” for a left-wing tax-and-spending spree. “A Senate evenly split between both parties and a bare Democratic House majority are hardly a mandate to ‘go it alone,’ ” Mitt Romney tweeted, on Thursday—and Romney would have to be a target for any Biden bill that is not purely a Democratic affair. Niche issues could also derail Biden’s plans: for example, a restoration of a state and local tax exemption—which Trump had capped, in a punitive measure against blue America—that Democrats from heavy-tax states such as New York and New Jersey are demanding be in the infrastructure bill. Biden, put simply, does not appear to have the votes to be another F.D.R. or another L.B.J. At least, not right now.
Which makes it all the more striking that Biden and his advisers, who have so far proved to be a pretty cautious and disciplined bunch, are willing to take the risk and go for it anyway. It seems to me that Biden’s decision to propose such an enormous set of government programs at a time of deep and seemingly insurmountable division tells us more about the state of the Democratic Party and its new President than about whether that President can actually pass his legislation. Biden and many Democrats appear to have given up on Republicans entirely, or at least Republicans on Capitol Hill, and to have made a significant bet on the current short but urgent window to get things done despite, rather than with, the G.O.P.
On Thursday morning, after Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh, I spoke with Doug Sosnik, who served as Bill Clinton’s White House political director and is well aware of the historical ebbs and flows to which Presidential reputations are subject. Sosnik made two historical arguments that I found provocative. The first is that Biden & Co. have decided to go big because they have concluded that Republicans have in recent years outplayed them in political-hardball tactics—on everything from refusing to vote on Obama’s final Supreme Court choice to rolling over for Trump, even after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. Democrats, he said, are “radicalized” by this, convinced that Republicans are “not on the level”; they are determined to be “much more aggressive” as a result. “The DNA of Republicans,” he argued, is that they have tended “to overuse power; the DNA of Democrats is that they have tended to underuse power, and I think that’s changing.”
That explains why Biden is willing to go big even without Republican votes, especially given the urgency of the interlocking crises that America faces. Biden and his team also appear to be acting on a well-known Washington fact, which long predates the current political dysfunction: it’s a lot easier to achieve major legislative action in the early months of a President’s term than at any point thereafter.
But it was Sosnik’s second point—that something even bigger is going on—which struck me as the real historical gamble by Biden’s team. They are now, in effect, advancing the proposition that the politics of the Reagan era—of endless tax cuts embraced by Republicans and of Democrats trying and failing to escape the label of big-government liberals—is finally over. In that sense, Sosnik argued, Biden’s sweeping legislative agenda really is the heir to L.B.J. and F.D.R., and a worthy successor to the great middle-class social programs of the past century. It is also, he argued, very, very popular in this “supercharged populist” moment.
There’s no question that Biden is right about this crisis being an inflection point for America—and for the world. I believe that, when he talks, as he has recently, about the global conflict between rising authoritarians and struggling democracies, this is the appropriate context in which to place his efforts to revitalize America at home. Chinese leaders are firmly convinced of the U.S.’s “rapid secular decline,” as a leading American Asia expert reminded me recently, and that the catastrophic final year of the Trump Presidency only accelerated this decline. Biden, at least, now offers a plausible argument for American renewal. But there is, of course, a key question that remains unanswered in the Capitol: Does Biden have the votes? Forget the breathless commentary. We don’t know yet.
