President Joe Biden delivers this speech at the apex of his popularity and momentum so far. Biden’s decades of experience show. His cabinet is confirmed and working. His staff is rock solid. Biden’s agenda is clear and straightforward:end the pandemic;restore the economy;rebuild the country’s infrastructure;expand healthcare,education and income security;advance racial equity and voting rights;solve immigration and end the crisis on the southern border;make real change on gun control and climate change;lead the world again.
There are no dramas. The nation’s collective blood pressure is down markedly since Trump,“the former guy”,left office. Same in Australia. We no longer wake up wondering what the hell the President did overnight.
The White House is back to normal. Biden and Harris get briefed every morning by the intelligence services. The press secretary gives daily media briefings,and she does not tell lies from the podium. After 100 days,no major officials have been fired,or interviewed by the FBI. Biden’s speeches rarely last more than 20 minutes. The COVID-19 advice comes from medical experts;there are no recommendations to use bleach in fighting the virus. No weekend crisis tweets from a gilded room in Florida. This President’s tweets are short and to the point on policy and priorities.
Three major patterns are now quite evident in the Biden presidency. He wants to be decisive,to go bold,to move big,move early,and move fast. This is seen as what is needed to recover from the catastrophe of more than 570,000 Americans dead from COVID-19. Biden proposed $US1.9 trillion for his rescue plan,and he got it all enacted. He is proposing another $US2 trillion for infrastructure.
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And in this speech,Biden will seek another $US2 trillion for health,education and support for American families. To understand the scale of all this,the new spending is four times the size of the annual US government budget. This is why the sweep of the Biden agenda,as centred and pragmatic as it is on basic services,is compared in vision and ambition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Thus far,Biden’s policies are broadly popular with the American people,including a good chunk of Republican voters. But they are fully opposed by the Republicans in Congress,whose clear intent is to stop Biden cold so that he fails at governing,enabling the Republicans to retake Congress in the mid-term elections next year. While some Republicans do want to do bipartisan deals with Biden,their compromise proposals are far too tepid,and they would take months to negotiate.
Biden wants movement now. This is a huge lesson he learnt from Obama being entrapped for fruitless months on health care and climate,at enormous political cost to his presidency.