Notebook President Joe Biden gives his first address to a socially distanced joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021.
Bidenism’s One-Two Punch The president’s case for his program rests on egalitarian nationalism and the value of democracy. That’s a more potent case than the Democrats have had in decades.
JIM WATSON / AP PHOTO
BY H A R O L D M E Y E R S O N PERHAPS BECAUSE he was compelled to wait longer than any presidential aspirant in American history before actually winning the White House, Joe Biden understands timing. Not just the need to move quickly on his far-reaching agenda, but also the order in which he presents its components. If Biden made one thing clear during his first hundred days as president, it’s that he understands, and is a master of, sequencing. In his first address to Congress, as he did throughout the first hundred days, he led with proposals for fundamental change, but particularly with proposals so popular that they’re hard to oppose. In the Republican
response to Biden’s speech, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott skipped lightly and quickly through his critique of Biden’s proposals for infrastructure, family assistance, and access to health care. Like his fellow Republicans, Scott felt more comfortable decrying the horrors of cultural liberalism, despite the fact that Biden’s truly landmark proposals, the ones he wants to brand his presidency, are fundamentally economic. Cobbled together, as they were in Biden’s congressional address, they amount to the closest thing to a social democratic manifesto that any American president has ever delivered. But it’s precisely the social
democratic aspects of Biden’s agenda that win the greatest popular support, including, polls show, from a quarter to a third of rank-and-file Republicans. So long as the debate focuses on kitchen-table issues, on the lived experience of the American people, Republicans haven’t really had much to say. Scott offered praise for hardworking single mothers, but Biden concretely offered them affordable child care and an extension of the wildly popular child allowance included in the American Rescue Plan. Confronted with Biden’s proposals for universal pre-K, free community college, bigger exchange subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, paid sick and family leave, elimination of lead water pipes, America First purchasing policies, tax increases on billionaires and offshoring corporations, and sundry other Biden proposals, Republicans have tied themselves in knots to come up with oppositional arguments.
MAY/JUN 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7
