The Biden way
I may be one of the few people like this, but I’m an enthusiastic supporter of Joe Biden. I approve of the job he is doing, think he has been a very effective president and am glad he’s running for reelection. I find his low-profile and boring style to be refreshing. His lack of charisma and a fanatical following is a feature, not a bug.
Biden deserves much more appreciation than he gets not only for his many legislative accomplishments, but for not making the president the center of attention all the time. He is the Rodney Dangerfield of politics. He doesn’t get no respect.
These two articles discuss different issues, but both illustrate the approach Biden has taken since taking office. While playing an active role, it has largely been behind the scenes. His approach in public has frequently been to stay quiet.[i] He is frequently criticized by all corners for doing that, but he has racked up win after win. It’s almost as if someone who has been in politics for 50 years knows more about governing than entertainers and hashtag warriors.
Many presidents and other elected officials enjoy the limelight and tend to seek it. The Biden approach is different. He is probably the most low-profile president we’ve had since Calvin Coolidge. Unlike most people in politics and media, he doesn’t use Twitter. Most normal people probably go days or even weeks without hearing his name. He promised to make politics boring and has succeeded.
The two articles linked to are from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The Times article discusses how Biden has approached LGBT issues as president. He famously came out in favor of gay marriage as vice president in 2012 before Obama did, which effectively forced his hand. As president, he has lifted the ban on transgender people serving in the military that was imposed by Trump. Last year, he signed legislation that protects same-sex marriages even if Obergefell were to be reversed.
The real world that he inhabits is radically different from the small bubble inhabited by left-wing professional activists. Biden doesn’t use any of their jargon and, like normal people, probably hasn’t even heard of it. He has had trouble remembering the acronym LGBT and has never introduced himself with his pronouns. That disconnect from the activist world has allowed him to accomplish things legislatively while staying above the fray. He has been able to support LGBT causes while keeping the most problematic activists at arm’s length.
The Biden approach brings many benefits. By not being online, he has avoided weighing in on the latest culture war fight of the hour. That is in sharp contrast with Trump who weighed in on every last culture war spat no matter how trivial it was. If he wanted to, Biden could start doing that. He could tweet every minute like Trump did or he could act like Ron DeSantis and use the word woke in every sentence. It’s a good thing he prefers to not be a freak.
That is just how he does things. He is a creature of the Senate and remembers how things were before there was cable news and the internet, let alone social media. That might make him sound strange to those who are extremely online or only know a world with social media dominating it, but to many others it is very normal.
While Biden gets a ton of flack for his age, it is not without benefits. Republicans would love nothing more than to tie him to left-wing cultural excesses. As the Times article notes though it’s hard to do that to a straight, white, male octogenarian. When Republicans talk about culture war fights, they have much more tempting targets to go after. Biden just doesn’t provide any real fodder for them. There are plenty of Democrats who, if they were president, could easily become Republican caricatures, but luckily Biden isn’t one of them.
The Journal article discusses three recent events where Biden purposefully chose to stay quiet despite pleas for him to be more vocal. Those were the 24-hour revolt in Russia, Trump getting indicted last month and the debt ceiling negotiations. On the Trump indictment, Biden has not only remained silent, but has ordered his staff, the Democratic National Committee and his reelection campaign to do the same. Some left-wing Democrats and advocacy groups are upset about that, but, as usual, Biden has way better instincts.
The goal of his silence on the indictment is straightforward. It’s critical that the investigation not be seen as partisan. Biden isn’t privy to any of what is going on and so has nothing to add to it anyway. The benefits of him speaking on the matter are zero while the costs could be very high. Trump and his defenders will say it’s partisan no matter what, but that’s not who counts. Who counts is everyone else. If Biden praised the indictment or said anything to that effect it could polarize it along partisan lines, which would be very bad and he knows that.
In the case of Russia, his remaining silent during that brief time was also right. Like everyone else, the Biden Administration was trying to figure out what was going on. There still are a lot of unknowns. What was important, as Biden said, was that Putin not think that it was a US plot. Had the revolt been serious and there was a civil war in Russia, it would have marked a huge escalation in the conflict if Putin thought the US was trying to depose him. Given how quickly the revolt ended, at a minimum, Biden would have looked foolish for having praised it.
Occasional slips of tongue notwithstanding, Biden has been very disciplined in how he has handled Russia. He has been very supportive of Ukraine, even controversially agreeing to give them cluster bombs. At the same time, he has limited what he will do and regime change in Russia crosses that line.
During the debt ceiling negotiations, some Democrats in Congress and on TV and social media were upset that he was saying so little in public. He got plenty of grilling in the press for that as well. Once again, he was right. When talking with reporters, Biden explained what he was doing. “And, look, one of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’ Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
As I wrote about then, the deal agreed to was fine. The process of getting there was awful, but that wasn’t his fault. The hardest part was getting the deal through the House. Their complaining aside, an overwhelming majority of House Democrats were going to vote for it and roughly 80% of them did. A large number of Republicans were needed to support it and Biden crowing about how good it was would have made that much harder and raised the odds of a default. He allowed Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the Republican leadership to do the talking and kept quiet. The deal passed and the biggest self-imposed threat to the economy is now on hold for at least two more years.
The Biden approach has limits
Biden’s skillset is much better suited for governing than campaigning. It’s no coincidence that his low-profile manner has allowed him to be legislatively successful, but has also made it harder to sell his accomplishments to the public. To be fair, that is never an easy task. Most people just don’t follow politics very much, if at all. For years, few people were aware of what the Affordable Care Act did. It was only when millions were at risk of losing their insurance that people found out how important it was.
Many of the areas where Biden has had accomplishments are not things that are easy to explain. Sometimes, they are things that people like, but are hard to get fired up about. Expanding broadband access to more places is good, but few people are going to be jumping in celebration. The things people will see from laws like the Inflation Reduction Act are things like factories making clean energy products. Few of them will associate those things with the law though because they don’t know what the law is and its benefits to them are indirect.
Lately, Biden and his staff have been more open about their accomplishments. The term Bidenomics has been used a lot lately. With inflation going down you can expect to hear more of that. Biden and others on his staff have visited and will continue to visit sites where projects financed by laws he has signed are being undertaken.
Those are good and necessary moves, but their effect will be limited. The reality is there is only so much any president can do to boost their approval rating and sell what they’ve done. Biden isn’t the first president to struggle with that and he won’t be the last. In his case, concerns about inflation have overridden almost everything else he has accomplished on the economy. Whether he will start to get credit for the huge employment success story he has presided over will be determined in part by whether wages keep growing faster than inflation.
If that happens, he should see an uptick in his approval rating and in the national mood. Unfortunately, the actual state of the economy is only somewhat related to how people are feeling. David Brooks argues that our national psyche is in a rut and I think that’s right. We are effectively going through a period of national demoralization, as he puts it. That is one of the worst things to come from Trump being president. He broke our brains and took what was a rising level of general distrust and turbocharged it.
The Biden approach is good for getting legislation enacted. It is also good for keeping the president from being a culture warrior and a deliberately divisive figure. The problem is that the psychological rut we’re in can’t be solved by legislation and certainly not by electing the right person president. The bitterness, or as many call it polarization, that is prevalent today has no obvious solution, which I wrote about recently.
Although inflation is and has been a problem, virtually all other economic measures are solid. It’s understandable that people would be unhappy about inflation, but the sky high level of pessimism can’t be explained just by that. One big influence on how things are perceived is press coverage. For all the alleged biases that reporters have, the one that is undoubtedly true is a bias towards negativity. Particularly on the economy, press coverage is overwhelmingly negative even when talking about a positive story.
When inflation went up, it got lots of coverage. Inflation now is less than half of what it was a year ago, but that has gotten comparatively little coverage. The rise and fall of gas prices is the best example of that. When people only hear about negative stories, it is going to affect how they perceive things. In general, I don’t like it when people complain about press coverage and I try hard not to do that, but it is how things are covered today. Whether it’s a reputable outlet or not, negative stories and angles are the rule.
Hopefully, a few more months of good economic news will change the narrative a bit. If wages continue to rise faster than inflation while unemployment remains low, that will start to get more attention. People already rate their own personal situation fairly well. What they’re down on is the national situation. Improving inflation numbers and positive press coverage should help some with that, but it won’t cure it.
It will obviously be a good thing if we continue to get good economic news. What won’t happen is an end to polarization or anything close to it. From Biden’s standpoint, improving economic and job approval numbers would be great for his reelection prospects, but he won’t be extremely popular. The polarization we have today puts a low ceiling on how popular any president can get. Biden could enjoy better numbers and win reelection comfortably, but he won’t win 60% of the vote and 49 states like Nixon in 1972.
The inability to bring everyone together and get us out of our psychological rut isn’t the fault of Biden or how he approaches things. No individual can do that by themselves. Brooks argues that Biden will need to serve as a sort of guide to the country and make himself the center of attention. I’m not sure what the former would entail, but I disagree with the latter. Not being the center of attention is part of what Biden does right.
Should Trump be nominated again, Biden will obviously be campaigning against him and in a different atmosphere than existed in 2020. He will talk about his accomplishments and argue that things are getting better and are on the right track. It’s hard to be the center of attention when dealing with Trump, but that’s not a bad thing. Many people on the right who are extremely online seem to think that no publicity is ever bad, but that’s totally wrong. In Trump’s case, the more publicity he gets, the more people are reminded of why they don’t like him. Biden would be wise to let him take up as much of the attention as possible to remind people that whatever they think of him, they really don’t like the alternative.
There are plenty of Democrats who would love to get in a fight with Trump. Most of the Democrats who ran in 2020 would have loved to call him names and fight with him on Twitter. Biden is thankfully not one of them. He has seldom said anything about Trump during his time in office. That takes serious discipline and keeping one’s eye on the ball. It’s a good thing we have a president who does that.
[i] Pro tip, be wary of anyone who craves being in the limelight. It says nothing about their intelligence or competence. What it does say everything about is their personality and not in a good way.