Joe Biden in Review, Part 1

The Domestic Side

In two previous columns I have tried to analyze why Kamala Harris was defeated in the presidential election. Now that Donald Trump is about to take power—he has already made many appointments—I think it’s a good time to assess Joe Biden’s presidency. Unlike what Trump says about Biden he was not the worst president ever. That is just GOP propaganda of the most venomous stripe. Biden did do some good things in his four years, and he did make some good appointments. But in my view, almost all of Biden’s achievements were on the domestic side. When you add in his foreign policy it is a decidedly mixed record.

In a recent essay for The American Prospect, Biden outlined what he thought he had done that was significant in the economy. (December 16, 2024). He began by saying that President Trump had exercised an economic policy of trickle-down economics. In a Reaganesque stroke, Trump tried to grow the economy from the top down. In simple terms, this means cutting taxes mostly for the rich and having government get out of the way. This would lead America to the promised land of what economist Arthur Laffer called supply side economics.

In Biden’s view, this did not work: it was a charade which, in turn, produced a mirage. America had a crumbling infrastructure, a hollowed out industrial base, jobs being exported abroad, and prescription drugs that were way too expensive. Biden tried to reverse what he saw as a declining economy. His Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), were all significant investments in the economy. These aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, providing clean water everywhere, and rebuilding bridges and roads and ports. These endeavors provided good jobs that were mostly unionized. It included constructing new factories to build semi- conductors and batteries for electric cars. The IRA is the biggest investment in clean energy ever. It creates solar panels, wind towers, and recycles batteries. And it is doing it in non-metropolitan areas like Dalton, Georgia. That act is creating the first new aluminum smelter plant in 40 years in Kentucky--powered by clean energy. Biden also wrote that the CHIPS award program had revived semi-conductor production in places like Taylor, Texas.

Biden also wrote that he had taken actions against those who violate trade laws and who threaten American businesses and workers. He mentioned Chinese production of electric vehicles, and solar cells. There is no doubt that Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC chair, was one of his best appointments

Biden then turned to his American Rescue Plan that vaccinated the country and helped return America to full employment status relatively quickly. One way was through the hiring of one million apprentices, many of them sponsored through unions. As economist Robert Kuttner has noted:

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. (American Prospect, 12/16/2024)

In a book he wrote in early 2022 about Biden’s presidency, Kuttner credited the president with governing “as far more of a progressive than most Americans expected.” (ibid) Kuttner noted that these actions were provoked by the pandemic conditions that existed and which President Donald Trump had failed to alleviate to the proscribed degree. Kuttner also gave credit to the influence of Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts.

At that time, Kuttner thought Biden had positioned himself to be a fine one-term president. But he seems to have begun to change his mind about this once he did better than expected in the 2022 elections. And by 2024, Biden had chosen to run again against Trump. We know what happened due to his poor performance in the one debate he had this time against the former insurrectionist president.

The obvious question then becomes: well, why did Biden not get more credit for what he did accomplish? One reason is that the Democrats lost the House in 2022, so by January of 2023 it was hard for Biden to initiate any more programs. But also, some of Biden’s programs will take some time to grow and to prosper.

Third, the Biden administration simply was not very good at messaging. Many Democrats did not know what things like the American Rescue Plan or Build Back Better, or Inflation Reduction Act were or entailed.

For example, the first bill--among other things--made a direct grant to LA County, and other cities, to ameliorate the conditions caused by CV 19; it also mailed stimulus checks to people making up to 80,000 per year; provided financing for CV 19 vaccinations; and expanded unemployment insurance benefits. Every single Republican in the House voted against it. On a very close vote in both chambers, Biden signed it into law on March 11, 2021.

A large part of the--eventually curtailed--Build Back Better program was a colossal investment in transportation infrastructure; to the tune of 621 billion dollars at first and over 3 trillion over several years. Some economists declare that this planned infrastructure investment was the largest by any president since Franklin Roosevelt. It included all aspects of infrastructure: roads and highways, airports, incentives to purchasing EV’s, coastal ports and electrification of school bus fleets. Included in this original plan were tens of millions to create new and unionized jobs.

The Build Back Better project did not pass in its original form. The main problem in the senate were the objections made by Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These objections were due to the size and scope of the plan. Senator Charles Schumer negotiated privately with Manchin and Build Back Better was greatly downsized and incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. In fact, as Kuttner noted in his book on Biden, Going Big, it was reduced by a factor of six, to 550 billion in new spending over ten years. And the funds for manufacturing and clean energy were erased. If any of the so called Republican independents had worked with Biden—Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski—Manchin’s opposition would have been neutered.

But I have to admit that those were rather nebulous titles. Either the rubrics should have been changed or the explanations needed to be appended and spelled out better. And then there was Kamala Harris. As Kuttner pointed out, Kamala 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.

But it was not just Harris. In my opinion the entire Biden communications teams failed to effectively state what the goals of these programs were and how they, first, broke with what the previous administration had done, and secondly how they would help the average American-- and the economy in general. If one thinks back to speeches made by FDR, Harry Truman and John Kennedy, those presidents did make their ideas known, and also the differences between their ideas and the opposition. But, for most Democrats—including Biden--this has become a lost art. And that is really a shame because this articulation could be quite beneficial to their cause.

I think part of this stems from Biden being Barack Obama’s vice-president for eight years. Obama had a great opportunity to pass something like Build Back Better after the economy crashed on George W. Bush’s watch in the fall of 2008. He did not even come close to proposing a New Deal. Employing Bill Clinton alums for advice—Larry Summers and Robert Rubin—he did not break up the banking system, not even close. Somehow Obama forgot that those men, particularly Rubin, opposed the regulation of one of the most wild and pernicious economic inventions ever: derivatives. And if that were not bad enough, they were willing to let the Glass/Stegall Act be repealed. Many observers thought that those two events, both occurring under Clinton, eventually helped collapse the economy. So what was Obama doing conferring with them, and hiring a Rubin clone, Tim Geithner, as his Treasury Secretary?

One can argue that Obama was working in the shadow of, not just Clinton, but Jimmy Carter. In twenty years, besides Obamacare, what could the average American say that those three men did for them? Therefore, because of this heritage, I think Biden and his team became hesitant at trumpeting the full spectrum of what his original plan was about--let alone carrying the battle to the holdouts. After all, at base, what Biden was proposing was anything but neoliberalism. And once all is said and done, I think that is what those three presidents were really about.

To add in a couple of not so admirable elements on the domestic side, Biden did not do a good job in investigating the causes of inflation. Especially the kind that was really felt by average Americans, that is at the supermarket and at the gas station.. As I have written, the price rises at the largest supermarkets in California have been outrageous. Whether this was a result of corporate greed or broken supply lines was never really delineated. One might also ask why are gas prices so high if American oil production is at record levels? In fact, according to government statistics, America not only outdoes Russia and Saudi Arabia, but it is now producing more oil per day than any other country at any other time. (See report of March 11, 2024 by US Energy Department.)

But to me, the most disappointing domestic aspect of the Biden administration was the choice of Merrick Garland as Attorney General. If the reader will recall, Garland was Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court who was, in effect, rejected by Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell. McConnell coined a new doctrine which said that he declined to have Democratic presidents making appointments to the Supreme Court in their last year in office. Therefore, Garland not only did not get approved, he did not even get a hearing.

Why and how that caused Biden to appoint Mr. Garland as Attorney General escaped me at the time, and it still does. I thought the obvious man to appoint was Doug Jones. From 1997-2001, Jones was the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Among his other legal achievements, Jones headed the task force that tried and convicted terrorist/bomber Eric Rudolph. He was also the last Democratic senator from Alabama. Jones had been defeated for re-election to the senate by the deplorable Tommy Tuberville. Since then Jones, for example, was appointed special master for an environmental clean-up mission involving Monsanto in Anniston, Alabama.

In my view, Garland blew two important cases. As we have just seen recently, even the Republicans on the House Ethics Committee found reasons to proceed against Florida Representative Matt Gaetz. According to the New York Times, the just released House report finds evidence Gaetz likely violated state laws on prostitution and statutory rape. (December 23, 2024). This is likely whey he resigned after Trump appointed him--of all people--as his Attorney General. And its also likely why he declined to go through the senate advise and consent process to be confirmed.

But even worse than this was Garland’s failure to move against the higher ups in the White House for the January 6^th insurrection. It was not until the House select committee led by congressman Bennie Thompson convened its public hearings that Garland finally decided to take action against the likes of Donald Trump, Sydney Powell , Rudy Giuliani, and Charles Eastman. Those hearings were so adroitly staged, and featured so many Republican witnesses--like White House counsel Pat Cipollone-- saying so many incriminating things about Trump, that Garland finally had to do something.

That turned out to be too late. Trump won the election, and Special Prosecutor Jack King halted his proceedings. I find it inexplicable that Garland had to wait until the late summer of 2023 to indict a man who summoned a zealous crowd to Washington, told them not to be weak, asked them to march to the capitol, and then watched them commit violent mayhem there for over three hours before he finally said that was enough. When it was all done, there were nine people dead, and 140 injured. Much of it was caught on tape, and there were scores of witnesses to how it was planned, including members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who brought weapons caches and stored then off site.

With all that, a prosecutor has to wait two and a half years before taking action? In my view, Doug Jones would have been working on it his first week. Mr. Garland failed the country.