So Congress made a COVID relief deal. It’s not awful under the circumstances, but it’s not enough, not nearly enough, and the direct checks and unemployment benefits will run only through March.
In other words, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans agreed to a pretty minimal number to last just long enough to make sure that arguments about the next stimulus start right after Joe Biden gets sworn in.
And Democrats will start fighting each other over its scope exactly three minutes after this current one passes. I can hear Mitch McConnell gurgling as he tells John Cornyn, “All we have to do is sit back and watch them eat each other.” Liberals and leftists will come at Biden with all sorts of demands and litmus tests, all of them to different extents valid and important. But many of those demands will be too in-the-weeds for regular voters. As far as the broader public is concerned, Biden’s first 100 days, indeed maybe his first year, will come down to a simple, single issue: how he handled the pandemic. That’s what people will talk about around water coolers, once they’re gathering around water coolers again, and his performance will be measured in two ways.
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The first will be about the virus itself. Did he—did the government—do a good job of controlling it? This will count for at least 60 percent of Biden’s first-year grade. He just promised 100 million doses in his first 100 days. He needs to hit that mark, and then keep going, because to vaccinate, say, 70 percent of the country will require something close to 500 million doses. All for free (for the people; paid for by the government).
This all has to work. It seems a good sign that Biden put Jeff Zients in charge of this. He fixed the Obamacare website rollout. Ron Klain also did a great job of setting up an anti-virus infrastructure (though nowhere near on the scale we’ll need next year) when Ebola hit, so he has experience here, too.
Republicans and right-wingers will try, as they always do, to fuck it up. It’s what they did during the early days of the ACA: reject the feds’ offer of extra money for health insurance, subvert the implementation of the law, and then turn around and yell to America, “See? It’s not working! Gummint sucks!”
Some of ’em likely will do the same thing here, scaring people away from taking what is today the “Trump Vaccine” (and is therefore good, good!) but by then will be the Biden Vaccine (bad, bad!), reducing the vaccine’s effectiveness and making the whole mess last longer, after which they can turn around and yell to America, “See? It’s not working! Gummint sucks.” Other Republicans are more apt to take an only slightly less cynical road, torching the roll-out of the vaccine rather than medicine itself. The effect will be the same either way. And either way, Biden will have to deal. There’s only one president, and people will blame, or credit, him.
The second way people will measure Biden’s handling of the virus is on the economy. Remember, even though the stock market is like totally unbelievable, the best anybody’s ever seen, we’re still several million pre-plague jobs in the hole, and the Congressional Budget Office and the Wall Street raters predict negative GDP running into the first quarter of next year. Millions of small businesses will still be closing and jobs being lost after Biden is sworn in.
That hands him a perfect Main Street vs. Wall Street moment, and Scranton Joey needs to seize it. He can galvanize public opinion, or at least the majority that supported him, by going big on a recovery plan. He can also unite the factions within the party. The left will get behind a go-big plan, with generous weekly benefits, state and local aid, and maybe a minimum wage increase tossed in, maybe a temporary tax surcharge on the super-wealthy. And even though it may make the centrists from purple districts nervous, I doubt very much that most of them would oppose it, because I don’t think they’d submarine their own president in his first hundred days.
It’s a fight Biden might lose because he won’t have the votes in the Senate, but if he plays it right, at least America will know who to blame. Here, we’ll see whether the presidency is still the bully pulpit it’s cracked up to be. You’ll recall that for these last two years, the House has passed bill after bill, and Nancy Pelosi has tried to stand up there and say “We passed a minimum wage-prescription drug-voting rights-whatever bill, and now Mitch is sitting on it.” And nobody listened.
One question I used to ponder as I watched those press conferences of hers was: I wonder if a Democratic president were also saying this; would that matter, would that get through, pierce the fog, wriggle its way into people’s brains? I guess we’ll find out.
It’s pathetic that it’s taken this long to get a deal on a second COVID-relief package. Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer, The Washington Post reports. That’s the core fact Biden and his team need to think about as they prepare to take office—as opposed to, say, what’s possible. I hope Biden learned from the Obama experience not to start out by negotiating with himself. Start out by communicating a message that’s big and simple and that people can get. Be on the side of suffering people. Don’t make it complicated.
