As Joe Biden slowly and not so surely gears up for his presidential campaign, Democrats are letting Republicans drive the political conversation.
As Joe Biden slowly and not so surely gears up for his presidential campaign, Democrats are letting Republicans drive the political conversation.
A casual survey of the issues dominating the headlines on Monday could lead less plugged-in observers to conclude that the Republican Party commands all the levers of political power in the United States.
The Washington Post’s coverage of the political waterfront includes features on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s polling woes, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’s comments about the January 6 riots, one-time senator Kelly Ayotte’s campaign for New Hampshire governor, and a forecast on the (quite limited) fallout Donald Trump can expect if he is criminally indicted for a third time. To the extent that President Biden’s party is subject to any scrutiny, it focuses on the ways his solicitor general has tried to increase demographic diversity in her office.
The New York Times follows suit. The paper of record’s politics coverage features items on the congressional GOP’s investigations into Hunter Biden, DeSantis’s campaign reboot, the state of play in the GOP primary heading into the first presidential debate, and a reporter’s experience shadowing former representative Will Hurd on the campaign trail.
The nation’s foremost exclusively political journal, Politico, devotes attention to internal tensions within the House GOP, how the Republican Party intends to pick fights on “abortion, trans care, [and] contraception,” more on DeSantis’s reboot, how conservative groups are funding the party’s most provocative members, and some speculation about whether Trump will commit to a debate.
Where have the president and the party in control of the U.S. Senate gone? Are Republicans the only people who happen to be making any news? To a certain extent, yes. From their slate of presidential aspirants to governors’ mansions across the country to the House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers and office seekers are driving the national conversation. Despite their control of the White House and the upper chamber of Congress, Democrats seem content to allow the GOP to monopolize the spotlight. Maybe they and their allies in the press believe that voters will sour on Republicans amid this prohibitive scrutiny, but that effect has not materialized in the polls. At the moment, the GOP’s dominance over the national agenda makes the Republican Party look like a government in exile — biding its time before an inevitable return to power.
President Biden’s relative absence from the national consciousness is particularly conspicuous. He has done little to set out a positive agenda for either the remainder of his term or the one he hopes to secure at the ballot box next November. That is not a function of the calendar, either. By this point in 2011, President Barack Obama had staffed up the Chicago offices of his reelection campaign, settled on its thematic messages, and set out in broad strokes a second–term agenda. Donald Trump never stopped running for president over the course of his term in the White House, and by the summer of 2019 he was busily retailing a second-term agenda to anyone willing to listen. This isn’t to say that Biden has no plans for a second term in office, but they look a lot like his plans for his first term in office — most of which are failures.
In May, the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey outlined what Americans can expect from Biden if voters give him the opportunity to “finish the job.” A second term would commit even harder to the elements in his $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” initiative, which couldn’t pass even with the president’s party in total control of Congress. Voters are being asked to get excited over a potential expansion of the social safety net to include universal prekindergarten and more subsidized housing. They are supposed to be energized by Biden’s promise to pursue new legislative restrictions on firearms ownership. They are expected to rally around the president’s promises to impose new confiscatory taxes on the wealthy and his amorphous pledge to reorient every aspect of the economy toward environmentalist objectives.
These paltry agenda-setting moves are dwarfed by the president’s efforts to frame his reelection bid as a referendum on Republican governance. Biden insists he will stand as a bulwark in opposition to GOP-led initiatives pertaining to voting rights, abortion, the climate, and even Russia’s war against Ukraine. In sum, the president is promising a rerun of his first term. Is it any wonder that he is confronted with an “enthusiasm problem” among Democratic voters?
When Biden and his political advisers aren’t boring Democrats into a stupor, they’re attempting to retroactively condition Democratic partisans into believing that his economic record is worth defending at the ballot box. The effort to popularize “Bidenomics” at least gives the president’s supporters something of substance to justify their boosterism. But more than one month into this public-relations campaign, it has failed to unify Democrats around Biden’s economic instincts.
For Democrats, the latest Harvard Caps-Harris poll tells a woeful tale. Sixteen percent of Democrats said that they believed that Donald Trump “better understands the economic problems people in this country are having” than Biden, and 16 percent of Democrats said the same thing about the congressional GOP. Seventeen percent of Democratic voters said Trump had “a better economic policy” than Biden does. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats said the Biden White House has spent “too much,” and another 37 percent said the budget deficit has grown by “too much” during Biden’s presidency. A majority of Democrats said inflation remains a “major” problem and expected it will continue to increase. Fully 22 percent of self-identified Democrats described Biden’s economic policies as “bad,” and only three-quarters of the party’s voters were “confident” that the president could address the economic problems plaguing the country.
Joe Biden has given his boosters little to justify their support. He is retailing a bizarrely detached narrative about the strength of the American economy that a critically large portion of his party doesn’t believe. He promises that, if reelected, he will do in his second term what he could not achieve in his first due to factionalism within his own party. He insists that he will oppose Republican designs, but that is the baseline expectation of any Democrat. What’s more, it has the implicit effect of casting the GOP as the party of energy and dynamism.
If this is how Democrats plan to run in 2024, it’s no wonder that all anyone wants to talk about right now is the Republican Party.