JOE’S BIDEN’S AMERICA

In the wake of the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election and the instalment of the Biden administration, The Sydney Institute held a Zoom meeting, on Thursday 25 February 2021, with Barbara Heineback, former strategic consultant with the Clinton Administration, and Bruce Wolpe, Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre and regular commentator on US politics. For Barbara Heineback, the Biden Administration did not seem to have outlined a clear plan for solving many deep-seated problems in spite of much important progress made by the Trump years; Bruce Wolpe instead saw a time with an experienced new president able to manage Congress and make much needed change.

JOE’S BIDEN’S AMERICA

BRUCE WOLPE

I’ll respond to some of the specifics that Barbara has mentioned, but first I do want to acknowledge that this platform is of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and I want to express my respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and to Gerard and to Anne, a real honour to address the Sydney Institute and thank you for the opportunity, and it is very timely.

I don’t want to debate Barbara, we have differences. I want to talk about Biden’s start as President and the overview is that he’s had an excellent start. It is a function of his being the most experienced person to enter the presidency, certainly in modern times and maybe in all of American history, given his three decades in the Senate and two terms as vice president. Compare him to other presidents, including Carter, a governor of Georgia or Clinton, a governor of Arkansas. Obama, was in the Senate for two years and a state legislator before that. Trump had never served in public office of any kind. I kind of wish Trump had been elected dog catcher once as he would have understood what public policy and institutions of government are all about.

Biden brings more experience to the job and I think that explains why he has had a good start. He is clear in his agenda, he’s moved with utmost deliberation and speed to go forward, even with an impeachment pending and so forth. His choices for officials have been marked with expertise and experience; they’ve been very well received, almost all of them will get through. One woman, Neera Tanden, up for office management of budget, that’s kind of dicey. By this stage, 12 years ago, Obama had three cabinet secretaries knocked back, so Biden will get his appointments through. That’s really quite good in a hostile Senate.

Biden has promised an administration that looks like America, and he’s delivering on that. His Cabinet does look like America. The issue on his agenda is not how far left his agenda is. It’s really an issue of how pragmatic it is, and that pragmatism reflects his outlooks, his priorities for the first hundred days, and they have been explained for months.

Biden has five major priorities. First and foremost, control the pandemic and roll out the vaccine; second, get economic recovery going; third, expand Obamacare and make sure people are covered in insurance; fourth, racial justice; fifth, climate change. They are all complex to be sure, but it is very straight forward and you can say in a few seconds what they are. The agenda addresses urgent issues that most Americans believe have to be addressed.

On the international front, there are three major priorities; repairing relations with the Western allies. You’ve seen, over the past few days, Biden meeting with the G7 and so forth. His message was expressed in Munich two years ago is that America will be back, and he’s saying America is back. The allies are heartened by that. The second major issue is China, and how that will be addressed. There is also Iran, and how that will be addressed.

I want to turn to Biden in Congress. The election was actually a big disappointment for Democrats because they lost seats in the House, and that was unexpected. They only gained a small majority in the Senate, and that was only after a run-off in Georgia. So, the Democrats in the House have only a six-seat majority, it is very, very slim. The Senate was, just as I said, barely taken over and they missed opportunities in many other states. That puts Biden in a precarious position, as far as the Congress is concerned, for getting his legislation through.

What can we conclude from the election is that Biden won. He won the same number of electoral votes as Trump won in 2016. But with the narrowing of the Democratic majorities in the House and a bare takeover in the Senate, the overriding sentiment was to get Trump out, but not to give Democrats a decisive political monopoly in Washington.

In these first few weeks of the Biden administration, what is absolutely clear is success on the first two overarching issues; the pandemic and the economy, are absolutely essential to him. Biden simply must get his $1.9 trillion package through in the first hundred days; he has to have it. There is a deep understanding, which Republicans understand just as much as Democrats, that if Biden fails to get that through on the first hurdle, his presidency will be permanently damaged, and everything is riding on it. There’s a vote in the House on Friday, and a vote in the Senate by the middle of March. In fact, failure to win Congressional approval of the American Recovery Plan will mean that Biden will not have the capital to win on his other agenda items that I mentioned; racial justice, climate change, expanding Obamacare, immigration. So, this is really crucial to his success.

Biden knows that if he fails on vaccines and economic recovery, if the country is not healthier by Thanksgiving and people are not back at work by the end of the year, that defeat means he will not be able to leverage his support, as I said, for other things to get through Congress. This is why Biden is determined to go big and go early, however he can get there to get this through. He said he wanted to work with Republicans, Republicans have said they want to work with Biden. But the difference between them is $1.3 trillion, and the Republicans are not rushing to be endorsed.

Biden’s determination is driven from 12 years ago when he was elected Vice President. With Obama President and the Great Recession in force, a major economic recovery program passed in the first 30 days of the Obama administration. It needed Republican support and Obama got some. But the price for the Republican support was a smaller package than Obama wanted. The results of that were that the recovery was tepid. Unemployment went done, but very slowly, the economy recovered very slowly. It ultimately led to eight years of economic expansion, but not at a rapid pace. Obama paid a hell of a political price for that. With the midterms 18 months later, he lost 60 seats in the House and control of the House of Representatives. That was the end of what Obama could do with Congress.

Biden understands that and that’s why he’s pressing so hard on this package, and that’s why he wants to get it done. That’s the lesson that he draws. In the House, this narrower majority means that it has to be a much more careful balancing act. I last worked on the Hill in the Obama administration. Obama could lose 39 votes in the House and still pass his bills; Biden can lose only 6. That means the calculations have to be much more refined.

In the Senate, it’s even tougher because, as some of you know, there’s something called the filibuster. The way the Senate operates it’s not just the majority of 51 out of 100 to pass something; you really need 60 to break the filibuster – people who can talk endlessly and stop legislation. There are not ten Republicans who want to join with Biden on immigration, there are not ten Republicans who want to join with Biden on climate change, so the answer to that question is to end the filibuster, which would be an explosive change in how the Senate is operating.

If Biden he gets his package through, he builds political capital – America’s working, America’s healthy, he’s a more popular president and he has more leverage to get stuff through. Maybe he can pick up two, three, four Republicans, but not ten to have 51, 52, 53 to pass the legislation that he wants. That’s what’s at stake in this Senate. I think, ultimately, Democrats will move to end the filibuster in the Senate, and you’ll read a lot about that.

Now, the Republicans and Trump. I want to talk about that for a little bit, being the good Democrat I am. There’s no question that Trump wants to continue to dominate the party, and he has an immense amount of control over the party. He has slapped down Mitch McConnell, who criticised him for his role in the insurrection against the Capitol on 6 January and he has made clear that he wants to exact retribution and revenge against Republicans who voted to impeach him and Republicans who have opposed him. I think if you locked all the Republicans in Congress in a room and turned out the lights and said, “Who do you really support as leader of the Republican Party?”, you’d get somebody else. But if you put them in broad daylight and asked, “Who do you really support as the leader for the Republican Party?”, well, 3/4 of them will say Donald Trump. He scares the hell out of them.

They’re afraid that Trump will come out and endorse opponents in their pre-selection, in their primaries, who will turn them out, and Trumpists will win. If Republicans take back Congress, Trump wants control of the Republican Party, not establishment Republicans and not moderates. Historically, in the first midterm election after a presidential election, so next year, those midterm elections generally go against the party in control of the White House. Clinton was elected in 1992 but he lost control of the House two years later. Obama got elected in 2008 but he lost control of the House two years later. Trump got elected in 2016 and he lost control of the House two years later.

With six seats in the House, this is not a heavy lift. But what Democrats think, as they look at their Republican dear friends, is that with Trump extremists as candidates they will lose the suburbs. The seats that control the Congress are like the lower North Shore here in Sydney – Warringah and other places. They’re not extremist; these are moderate conservatives in the suburbs. If Trump keeps pushing and the Republican Party keeps rewarding extremists, that’s how Democrats think they can cushion against this historical trend in the midterm elections. So that is something to watch.

The deplatforming of Trump has really changed his potency outside the Republican Party a little bit, because he has less air time. People are not paying as much attention because he’s not on all the time. I really thought before Twitter knocked him off, that he would be tweeting against Biden from the first moments of Biden’s inaugural speech, and that he would be the alternative president. He is not in that position, because of his changed status in cyberspace. That’s a really interesting development.

I want to close by talking briefly on Biden in Australia. The relationship is excellent. Of all the countries in the world that had relations with Donald Trump, Australia, over the past four years, has had the best of any other country, and that includes Israel frankly. That’s attributed to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Defence Minister, the Ambassadors. They did a really good job under difficult circumstances, and Australia came through great. There was no trade retaliation by the United States against Australia, compared to most other allies that the US has, and that’s really top work. The people around Biden have been to Australia, they know Australia, they care about Australia and they care about its future so the relationship is just fine.

I see three immediate major issues of a bilateral nature, the first is China. What’s interesting is that Biden has the same agenda with China that Trump had on trade imbalances, intellectual property, the strategic situation and how they regulate their economy. But he’s going to go about it in a different way. It’s not going to be so much trade, Trump vs Xi, mono on mono, the two countries duking it out. Biden wants to roll up to China with a huge coalition of Western allies that have the same economic interests as the United States in opening up China, and use that leverage and get much more done than Trump was able to get done.

We shall see how that plays out. The breaking of the ice provides good opportunities for Australia to begin to rectify the hole it’s in with China and the terrible way in which China is treating Australia. There are some opportunities here that will be evident over the next 6-8 months that can only benefit. I don’t see the Australia-China relationship getting worse, I see it getting more manageable and better. On climate, the message to Australia is, John Kerry is coming for you. He has seized on the issue, the Democrats have seized on the issue and there is not much that Prime Minister Morrison can say to President Biden about slowing up one millimetre in where they’re going to go.

This doesn’t disrupt the relationship; this is a little irritant in the relationship. So there will be differences here. Since there is a huge echo chamber of what happens in Washington playing back here, the climate debate in Washington will affect domestic politics here, as to where the parties land visa vis whatever Biden and Kerry are doing. That will play out.

The third area is big tech and anti-trust. We saw a bit of that with Facebook. The interesting thing to me about big tech and anti-trust in Washington is how much it unites the Republican and Democratic parties. The Republican Party hates Silicone Valley because they think they’re a bunch of leftists and the Democrats hate Silicone Valley because of the concentration of power and the abuse of consumers that these companies deal with and their accountability under the anti-trust laws and the rule of law. Who’s more powerful, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Emission and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or Facebook? That is what’s being played out in Washington, and that will affect things here. Washington has paid very close attention to what has happened here. We saw that this week. What Facebook did here, I think, strengthened the hand of those in Washington who want to bring accountability to the behemoths of Silicone Valley. A very interesting dynamic.