This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Joe Biden
A substantial group within the Republican Party is obsessed with Hunter Biden and somehow thinks that if he is exposed the entire Democratic-Biden-Harris edifice will come crashing down. That is the fevered fantasy of MAGA loyalists, but it has slowly taken over the party.
There is no precedent for the President of the United States giving a major speech warning of the threat of democracy being undermined by domestic forces aligned with a major political party, but that is precisely what President Joe Biden did on September 1st. The threat Biden identified is real. While there is value in alerting Americans to the danger that, to use Biden’s phrase, MAGA Republicans, pose to American democracy, Biden’s speech will do little to ameliorate that threat.
The Alaska race is particularly significant because a prominent celebrity with ties to Trump lost in a solidly Republican state. The rank choice system in Alaska provides some insight into the race. It turns that the votes for third place finisher Nicholas Begich, a Republican from a prominent Democratic family, did not go to Palin by enough of a margin to defeat Peltola. This suggests that animus towards Palin was a driving force in the election. That cannot be good news for candidates like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania or Herschel Walker in Georgia. Both are, like Palin, c-list celebrities with strong ties to Trump and little knowledge of government. Palin’s defeat is a sign both that the Democratic Party may be in better shape that it seemed a few months ago, and that candidates matter.
Although the most recent polls are not great for Trump, there is little reason to think he will decide not to run and very few, if any, people inside of the Republican Party can stop him.
The best way for the US to help Ukraine is to have a functioning Biden administration-and preventing that is the primary goal of the GOP. Therefore, doing the domestic and policy work must be at the center of Biden’s efforts to support Ukraine in this war.
Biden’s challenge is to maintain the consensus view of Putin and Ukraine by continuing to show the American people the horrors of what is occurring in Ukraine and why it is imperative that the US do something about it. The latter is more difficult than the former, but if Biden cannot do that, then the transformation of his presidency will be brief and the return to stalled policy proposals and low approval ratings will be swift.
It is true that sometimes presidents have to place good policy over short term political gain; and the war in Ukraine is certainly one of those times when that calculation might be necessary, but Biden could do more to reduce some of the possible political harm of these policies.
Justice Stephen Breyer’s announcement that he is stepping down from the Supreme Court after serving on the highest court in the land for almost 28 years has naturally set off a spate of speculation about who President Biden will pick as his replacement. During the campaign Joe Biden pledged that if elected he would appoint the first African American woman to the court. All signs indicate that Biden intents to honor that pledge and several African American women’s names have been mentioned as possible candidates.
We cannot know for certain who Biden will choose, but we know that the President must get his nominee confirmed. This is looking likely because even Democratic senators like Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona and Joe Manchin from West Virginia, who have opposed important parts of Biden’s legislative agenda, have supported Biden’s previous nominees to federal courts. Anything can happen, but there is a good chance the caucus will stay together and confirm whoever is nominated. Although there would be 6-3 conservative majority on the court, replacing Breyer with a younger liberal justice who will bring a new perspective to the court is good news for the Democrats.
If that nominee is confirmed she will not be the first federal judge appointed by Biden and confirmed by the senate. In fact, thus far just over a year into his presidency, Biden has already had 42 of his nominees confirmed. That is the most any president has confirmed in his first year in office since 1981. It is also a piece of political information that while very important for Americans is not widely known, even among progressive voter who should care a lot about this.
The fault for this does not lie with the voters, but with the Biden administration. It reveals the inability of the White House to effectively communicate its accomplishments. The first year of the Biden presidency has been far from perfect. Two new variants of Covid, inflation, the poorly managed withdrawal from Afghanistan and the inability to pass Biden’s Build Back Better bill have not only marred his first year in office, but they have become part of a group of negative stories that have defined the Biden presidency-and the Biden administration has let that happen.
This is unfortunate for the President because it doesn't take much scrutiny to see that has accomplished quite a bit. The massive Covid relief bill, the infrastructure bill, the early success in getting vaccines out despite a Republican supported anti-vaccine movement and the number of federal judges appointed and confirmed are among President Biden’s most significant accomplishments. Even the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is now remembered primarily for the difficulty and horrific optics around evacuating people from the country, was a case of Biden implementing a popular policy that previous presidents had promised and not delivered.
Biden’s poor poll numbers over the last several months, which if unchanged will probably lead to a big Republican win the midterm elections, are due in large part to the battery of economic, political and public health problems that the country continues to face. However, these numbers also reflect Biden not getting credit for his accomplishments-and while the media environment is very tough, getting credit for the things you do right is something all presidents, and other chief executives, must be able to do.
The failure of the Biden administration in this area has taken two forms. First, they have simply not made sufficient effort to draw attention to and take credit for their accomplishments. The Covid relief checks went out earlier this year to little fanfare from the White House. Similarly, the infrastructure bill, which was by any measure an enormous accomplishment that will help communities around the country has receded from the public consciousness and become something that seems to be mentioned only Washington insiders.
The second misstep the Biden administration made was to allow expectations to be extremely elevated during the early months of Biden’s presidency. In those halcyon days it was not altogether uncommon to find articles and commentary suggesting that Biden was going to be the new Franklin D. Roosevelt and remake American social policy. There are only a handful of American politicians to whom no president should ever allow himself to be compared. Abraham Lincoln is one and FDR is another. If the bar for a successful Biden presidency was the New Deal, then he was always going to be seen as a failure, but for some inexplicable reason, Biden allowed that framework to emerge.
As the midterm election approaches, the Democrats are in danger of having an election that is about their failure to end the pandemic, combat inflation and deliver a massive spending bill, but it is not too late to make the election about the Democrats success in vaccinations, infrastructure, Covid relief, and for the base of the party, judicial appointments. A successful Supreme Court confirmation might just be place for the messaging around Biden to change, but it won’t happen unless the White House takes the lead on that.
Photo: cc/Amaury Laprote
Given Russia’s role in destabilizing American politics in recent years, it is certain the Kremlin understands the President, and the country’s, vulnerability at this moment. That may not be the primary reason they have chosen now to loudly beat the drums of war in Ukraine, but it has certainly informed their thinking.
The biggest challenge is to persuade a significant proportion of those who now support the authoritarian movement that is almost entirely indistinguishable from the Republican Party that democracy is a better solution. If the GOP is recaptured by conservatives who believe, generally, in the idea of democracy, or if it is defeated enough that fewer than about 30% of the American people support it, democracy will have a chance in the US. However, if neither of those unlikely events come to pass, the crisis will endure for a while.
The American media has been covering politics as a horserace, giving equal times and credence to both sides, for so long that it is very hard to change. However, the overarching story in the US now is the threat to democracy posed by the GOP. Ignoring that in favor of false equivalencies and continuing to treat both sides as roughly equal is not just lazy and bad for democracy, but, by overlooking the true nature and goals of the Republican Party, is also deeply partisan.
This contract ratchets up tension not just between Australia and China, but between the US and China. That, not the contracting question itself, is the more important story here.
Events in Afghanistan over the last few days have been a long time coming. They may, in fact, demonstrate how President Biden mishandled the drawdown of troops, but they are better understood as what may be the final chapter in an overly ambitious war that flummoxed American policy makers over two decades and four presidential administrations.
From Putin’s perspective, this meeting will be very different than his interactions with Biden’s predecessor. Unlike Trump, Biden is not going to trust Putin’s word rather than the findings American intelligence agencies. Similarly, whereas Russia supported Trump and sought to help him in his campaigns in both 2016 and, less successfully, in 2020, Biden has never benefited from the Kremlin’s forays into American domestic politics. In short, Russia has lost a client in the White House and that will frame the entire summit. Accordingly, in addition to the myriad issues and tensions between the two countries, for Biden and his party, there is also a sense, among many around Biden, of there being unfinished business from the 2016 election, the SolarWinds hack in 2020 and the relatively new, but enduring and nefarious, ties between the Kremlin and the American far right. Accordingly, Biden’s primary message Putin should be that “there’s a new Sherriff in town.” That is the kind of message that is best delivered in person, but that also needs to be backed up with meaningful actions.
Whatever efforts this administration can make to deescalate the conflict and end this current outbreak of violence must be balanced against the unfortunate reality that there are actors on both sides that have little or no incentive to deescalate and who likely benefit, at least in the short term, from the conflict.
Thus, the political magic of Joe Biden is that anything he proposes just sounds reasonable and moderate. In the first one hundred days of his presidency, Biden has been able to deploy that magic to move forward the most progressive domestic agenda of any American president since Lyndon Johnson well over fifty years ago. This has left the Republican Party unsure of the best strategy for attacking Biden, and therefore for the upcoming 2022 midterm election.
A period where there is no pressure from the American president to find a peace deal and where the American president feels no pressure, from himself or others, to deliver peace may, ironically, be precisely the best environment to begin discussions, informally and with no expectations, around what a peace deal might look like.
Americans are fond of citing the founders concerns about tyranny of the majority. However, the system as it is currently constructed not only prevents tyranny of the majority but also simply governance by the majority-or by anybody else.
Today the idea of America as the indispensable, or more charitably, essential, nation is badly frayed. In some respects, the last four years gave the rest of the world, whether friend or foe of the US, a glimpse of what a world without American leadership might look like. No country paid closer attention to that than China, because it is clear by now that if American leadership continues to wane, China is the country that will fill that void.
We will never know how many people Americans died because other Americans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be bothered to care even a little bit about other people, but the number is probably quite substantial. In addition, it is apparent that the people who refused to wear masks and ignored social distancing protocols not only directly contributed to the deaths of Americans but were free riders who took advantage of an America that was safer because of the sacrifices of others.