Biden’s Economic Triumph and Political Tragedy

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President Biden’s piece in the Prospect provides a fair, accurate, and impressive summary of all that he accomplished. A question that will perplex historians for some time to come is why Biden did not get more political credit, and why Vice President Harris was not able to turn the real achievements of the Biden-Harris presidency into a winning campaign.

A related question is how the policy success and political failure of the Biden presidency should inform the future positioning of the Democratic Party.

In early 2022, I published a book on the first two years of Biden’s presidency titled Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy. In that book, I credited Biden with governing as far more of a progressive than most Americans expected.

I attributed that shift to the economic circumstances he inherited, which required big, Roosevelt-scale government actions; and to the influence of allies to his left, most notably Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose counsel informed both Biden’s policies and personnel. I urged Biden to position himself as a great one-term president, something that Biden had hinted at in 2020, but then changed his mind after a better-than-expected midterm result in November 2022.

Surprisingly, Biden became a convert not just to extensive emergency anti-recession spending (to a much greater degree than Obama in a worse recession) but also to a deeper repudiation of neoliberalism and an embrace of national economic planning for the sake of reviving domestic industry and good jobs.

So why didn’t Biden get more political credit?

First, the legislative phase of Biden’s presidency basically ended in January 2023 when he lost the House. And given the opposition of Sens. Manchin and Sinema, he never fully had the Senate in his first two years and delivered only part of his program. So even Biden’s truncated new New Deal only lasted for half his presidency.

Second, the 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation. Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit. Too many working-class voters still didn’t trust Democrats. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the complex dynamics of inflation got unfairly blamed on Biden. And the timing of the pop-up pandemic safety net meant that real benefits to Americans ran out on Biden’s watch, from expansions of Medicaid and unemployment insurance to the boosted Child Tax Credit, which Republicans and Manchin refused to renew.

Third, Biden was too old, especially when voters took a close look at him as a candidate for re-election, at age 82 and increasingly frail. We can’t rerun history, but if he had announced after the 2022 midterms that he would not be a candidate for re-election, Democrats might have found their way to a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris.

Fourth, Harris failed utterly at building on Biden’s successes. She tacked back and forth between embracing the economic populism of Biden’s programs and reassuring her corporate and billionaire donors. Her message was blurred because her convictions were blurred.

Finally, social, cultural, and foreign-policy issues became a distraction. Recent statistics showing immigration at record levels in the Biden years did damage. Demands on issues such as DEI and trans rights left the Democrats damned either way—losing core support if they trimmed but giving Republicans ammunition if they stayed the course. Biden’s unwavering support for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu may have reassured some Jewish voters, but it signaled presidential weakness and made him complicit in a terrible tragedy.

Whatever conclusions are drawn from Biden’s successes and Harris’s loss, the idea that Democrats should shift more to the center on economic issues is the most preposterous. Trump’s administration will be a team of oligarchs. There was never a more urgent time for Democrats to champion working people.

I began my book with the sentence “Joe Biden’s presidency will be either a historic pivot back to New Deal economics and forward to energized democracy, or a heartbreaking interregnum between two bouts of deepening American fascism.” It’s now up to all of us to make Trump the interregnum.