Our outrage receptors were burned out during Donald Trump’s presidency. For that reason, I was rooting for a boring Biden. I thought the country needed some time to heal and regroup after the chaos of the Trump administration.
Instead, Joe Biden has exploited our PTSD, and subsequent ennui, to expand the power of government and change how it relates to citizens (and the other way around). Trust me, I have tried to sound the alarm. But it is next to impossible to get anyone worked up about the big, bad things that Biden is doing under the radar. The man is impossible to demonize. He oozes character and radiates sympathy. Criticizing him, even on policy grounds, is greeted as an unforgivable affront—sort of like punching Bambi.
We are so comforted by the nice, banal, old gentleman now running the store that we are oblivious to the dozens of moving vans shuffling huge boxes around back. “Nothing to see here!” Uncle Joe’s calm demeanor suggests. But instead of delivering on bipartisan centrism and normalcy, Biden has lulled the country to sleep while he’s dramatically growing government. And because that’s not some sexy culture war issue, few Republicans are paying attention. He’s killing us softly.
This bait-and-switch would not even be possible without the deadly combo of Trump’s insane behavior and a global pandemic. But Biden shouldn’t receive carte blanche permission to eschew the promise of bipartisan compromise and centrism and spend unprecedented amounts of money (mostly on things that have little to do with the problems he inherited) just because of the circumstances.
The Trump train ran us over, and Biden is not letting that trauma go to waste. We are anesthetized: comfortably numb and oblivious to our surroundings. Someday we are going to wake up and ask, “Where’s the rest of me?” And by then it will be too late. By the time our kids or grandkids end up paying the bill, Biden will have long since doddered to his final reward.
Being boring, it seems, is Biden’s superpower. And he’s exploiting it to the hilt. I’ve been documenting this development for a while, but others are finally starting to notice the same things. “Biden’s success is a product of the crucial yet little-appreciated insight that substantive advances don’t require massive public fights,” writes Jonathan Chait. “He is relentlessly enacting an ambitious domestic agenda…while arousing hardly any controversy. There’s nothing in Biden’s vanilla-ice-cream bromides for his critics to hook on to. Republicans can’t stop Biden because he is boring them to death.” But it’s not just his style and strategy. Biden’s identity and demeanor do not threaten or excite. Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher put it this way: “You cannot underestimate how comfortable Uncle Joe is for a lot of people. They give an old, white guy the benefit of the doubt.” This is “No Drama Obama” on… what’s the opposite of steroids? Xanax?
There’s a great episode of 30 Rock where Matt Damon, playing Tina Fey’s airline pilot boyfriend, declares, “If you walk briskly in a pilot's uniform, you can go pretty much anywhere.” Biden’s persona serves a similar purpose. Appearing normal and nonthreatening, it turns out, is camouflage. It’s a devious defense mechanism. He seems so nice! It’s hard to get outraged about someone who wants to (a) give you money and (b) spend money on nice-sounding things.
Never mind the fact that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Go tell the average person that the money Biden wants to spend on an “infrastructure bill” for long-term care is about the same amount that was spent on Medicare Part-D (an issue that was hotly debated not that long ago), and then cue the yawns. “Well, long-term care sounds like a good thing,” you’ll hear. “INSTEAD OF BEATING UP JOE, WHY DON’T YOU WRITE ABOUT HOW THE LAST GUY INCITED AN INSURGENCY?” others will demand. “He’s getting stuff done!” Yes, but at what cost?
Part of the problem is that Trump (and his predecessors) greased the skids—not just by attention-seeking behavior—but by spending extravagantly, and with few consequences. But what is not appreciated is how Biden has taken things to a radical, new level. To put it in perspective, as veteran columnist Clyde Haberman recently reminded us, “Counting $1 million at a dollar a second takes 11.57 days. $1 billion at that pace takes 31.7 years. $1 trillion needs 31,710 years.” Biden’s proposed “infrastructure” plan is over $2 trillion (the first half, at least), which means it would take you more than 63,000 years to count the money. Of course, that doesn’t count the already-spent $1.9 trillion COVID relief package—or the second half of Biden’s infrastructure plans (the “human infrastructure”).
Again, nobody cares. We are just grateful that Biden isn’t inciting riots and yelling at us—so much so that we are willing to look the other way when it comes to the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS he is “giving” us and/or redistributing (much of it sold under false pretences). Again, boringness covers a multitude of sins. Even when Biden does something outrageous like weigh in on the Derek Chauvin trial before the jury has delivered a verdict, we don’t get outraged because, compared to Trump, he is so nice about it. And because he doesn’t send mean tweets.
Would it be too much to ask to have a president who doesn’t act crazy and isn’t trying to radically change the size and scope of government via tax-and-spend liberalism while enacting a radically aggressive environmental plan, and redefining words so that any legislation can be passed on a party-line vote by calling it “infrastructure” or shamed by invoking “Jim Crow”? Or are we just meant to sit idly by while he spends trillions saying that won’t stoke inflation or anything else?
I won’t go quietly into this good night. I don’t think we should trade one extreme (president) for another—even if the latest one seems much more normal.
