This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Joseph Biden
A Ukraine reeling from invasion and possibly occupation would be weak, unstable and have no chance of further integration into NATO and the EU. That may be Putin’s goal, but it may not be all he is trying to do. And, Ukraine is not the only country that could end up weaker and less stable due to this war.
January 6th will mark one year since the violent insurrection at the US Capitol that sought to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. While that is a significant anniversary that we should recognize and reflect upon, it should not be overlooked that 2022 is the sixth year in a row that has begun with American democracy in crisis.
Trump’s Covid policy, and recent revelations about how he endangered the life of Joe Biden are not just stories that demonstrate his erratic behavior and tenuous grip on reality, but a reminder of the danger Donald Trump represents in so many different ways and that even though the disgraced former president has always been a big buffoonish, we must continue to take him very seriously.
There are never any guarantees in politics. Sinema and Manchin could decide to sabotage any major spending bill. The Delta variant could regain strength, or a more deadly and infectious new variant could emerge. Despite those possibilities, there is a clear path forward for Joe Biden’s presidency and a clear roadmap for improving his fortunes that are now lower than at any point during his relatively young presidency.
Moreover, whether they truly believe this or are doing it for political reasons becomes less important with every passing day. If you perform ignorance, cult-membership, dishonesty and racism for half a decade, you become ignorant, part of a cult, dishonest and racist-and that is the plight of the Republican Party six months into the Biden presidency.
If the stories about Harris and her Chief of Staff being difficult to work with and occasionally treating other staff poorly are true, that would make her similar to almost every other elected official. A powerful politician not treating staff well is a dog bites man story. However, the questions of why it is being reported and who benefits from these stories is more important.
Hoax is an important word in the contemporary GOP lexicon. It is the political equivalent of Charlie Brown pleading with Schroeder “Tell your statistics to shut up!”
The problem the GOP faces is not so much that Kevin McCarthy is not well liked, but that none of their attacks on Joe Biden seem to be particularly effective, so a proxy fight between Biden and McCarthy would be a win for the Democrats.
Biden’s Foreign Policy Priorities
For most of his career as vice-president and as a member of the US Senate, Joe Biden appeared more interested in foreign policy that domestic politics. That foreign policy expertise and reputation likely played a role in Barack Obama’s decision to make Biden his running mate in 2008. Had Biden become president at another time, or in another political and public health environment, he might have brought that emphasis to the presidency, but that is not possible now. Six weeks or so into Biden’s presidency, it is apparent that he is, wisely and appropriately, spending more of his time and political energy on domestic issues. Biden has not ignored foreign affair as he has sought to persuade America’s allies that the US has moved past the Trump era, had a series of calls with world leaders and recently sanctioned Russia for their treatment of Alexei Navalny. However, it is apparent that Biden’s emphasis remains on domestic policy, primarily his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 recovery bill and getting more Americans vaccinated from the pandemic.
At first glance, this emphasis on domestic policy, which stems from both the numerous domestic crises in the US that include the pandemic, the economic problems precipitated by the pandemic, income inequality, the January 6th insurrection, racial tensions, and from an American population that, due to these multiple crises, is less interested in seeing American involvement in every corner of the globe, may seem like an obstacle for the new President’s foreign policy goals. However, there is another angle for Biden that might make this reality a strategic asset.
The need for Biden to focus on domestic problems give him an odd kind of leverage in the realm of foreign policy. Biden will be able to focus on only a relatively small handful of foreign policy goals, issues and crises. In other words, a more limited presidential involvement will force Biden to set foreign policy priorities. The de facto position of the US is often that everything is a priority, but if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority, and if nothing is a priority then foreign policy is purely reactive.
It is already apparent what some of Biden’s priorities will be. We know that climate change will be a top domestic and foreign policy priority for this administration. Bilateral relationships with both China and Russia are complex and hugely important for the US, so Biden will place some emphasis there. However, the remaining priorities are less clear. For example, the President has already indicated that the Middle East is unlikely to be a top priority.
These limitations may be an asset because they allow the US both to remove itself somewhat from foreign policy challengs in distant countries that may be a of secondary or peripheral importance to the US, while at the same time making Biden’s presence, when he chooses to become personally involved, even more significant. This will not upset the day to day functioning of foreign policy because US foreign policy institutions, particularly now that Biden has returned those bodies to competent leadership, can function well without direct presidential involvement.
Domestic political considerations are part of this framework as well. Back in late 2015 when Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House was just beginning, one of the substantive policy issues where he differed from the majority of the leadership of his party was on the question of how involved the US should be with the rest of the world. Trump’s vision was much more isolationist. This later became his America First policy, a phrase that some may remember was used by the Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites like Charles Lindbergh who wanted the US to stay out of World War II. This fundamental difference on foreign policy between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party contributed to his winning the nomination. Bernie Sanders’ strong support in both 2016 and 2020 was also, in part, due to his foreign policy views, which were significantly less interventionist than most of the leadership of the Democratic Party. It is clear there is a growing appetite for a reduced US role in the world, but the Covid crisis may have made it, at least for now, something of a necessity.
Biden, a longtime member in good standing of the strongly interventionist foreign policy establishment, was always going to confront the challenge of crafting foreign policy for a country whose population is increasingly looking inward. The multiple domestic policy crises make that a necessity now, but also give Biden an opportunity to do it thoughtfully. If Biden responds to the current dynamic by trying to return to the kind of expansive foreign policy that has characterized most of the last 75 years, but that began to change under the previous administration, he will be fighting an uphill and almost pointless battle. However, crafting an approach to foreign policy that recognizes the reality of America’s challenges and interests while reflecting the needs and priorities of the American people would be very positive way to reframe American foreign policy. This will not be easy, but Joe Biden is uniquely positioned to do it.
Photo: cc/U.S. Secretary of Defense
Thursday night’s debate, mercifully the last in this presidential election, revealed two very different understandings of and approaches to governance. Moreover, it highlighted how Donald Trump’s failure regarding the Coronavirus pandemic was, among other things, an extraordinary failure of governance.
The tension between the Constitution and principles of democracy have been around for a long time, but the same demographic and political trends that made the Trump presidency possible, have made this conflict more damaging than in recent years. Today, three of the four bodies that govern America are controlled by a party that has not won the plurality of votes in a national presidential election since 2004-and only twice since 1988. Donald Trump’s presidency, the Republican majority on the senate and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court are, therefore, not the products of majorities or truly democratic processes, but of a minority of voters who happen to live in the right states.
The recent months of the Covid-19 pandemic have made Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses and mental instability, as well as the cult-like loyalty of his of his followers, even more apparent. In the last few weeks, even in the last few days, as Donald Trump has asserted his “total” authority while continuing to suggest that, in so many words, universal suffrage is prima facie election fraud, the acceleration of democratic rollback has increased substantially. Queries and earnest commentary about whether the US is in the beginning of a Constitutional crisis seem positively quaint now. We are not at the beginning of that crisis, nor, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, are we at the end of the beginning. We are in the middle, or perhaps more alarmingly, approaching the end of that crisis-and democracy is losing.
A central part of Biden’s comfortable old shoe appeal is that he will return the US to a more normal pre-Trump time. This has been an implicit, and at times, explicit, theme of Biden’s campaign. It is one of the reasons he frequently cites his close relationship with Barack Obama as well has his ability to work across the aisle in what he presents as the halcyon bipartisan days of a previous era. It is not hard to see why older and more moderate Democrats are drawn to this idea, but unfortunately it is not only impossible, but even dangerous to act as if we can simply unring the bell of the Trump administration and pretend it never happened.
Every four years a subset of pundits and political junkies speculate about a brokered convention where no candidate comes into the convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot, thus leading to discussions, multiple ballots and deal-making before a nominee is finally chosen. For much of American history this was common, but in the last half century or so that has changed. The last genuinely brokered Democratic convention was 1952 when the eventual nominee was Adlai Stevenson. Early opposition to Donald Trump among many Republicans led to speculation that the 2016 Republican convention would be brokered, but it didn’t work out that way.
Bernie Sanders has been running for president essentially nonstop for almost five years now. For much of that time the question that has been the subtext of his candidacy has been can he win-first the Democratic Party nomination and then the general election. With the Iowa caucus, the first contest of the 2020 nominating season, less than a month away, it may be time to rephrase that question-at least the first half of that question-and ask if Bernie can lose the Democratic Party’s nomination. That is an overstatement, but a confluence of recent events and developments in the race have bolstered Sanders’ chances.
The biggest political question is what impact a House impeachment and Senate acquittal would have on the presidential election. There is no way to tell, but we know that impeachment proceedings would last well into 2020, and the political impact well beyond that, thus making it very likely that the campaign would not primarily be about climate change, health care, education, guns or any other issues that are good for the Democrats, but about impeachment. That might help the Democrats, but it seems apparent that there is no guarantee of that. In fact, it may be precisely what Trump wants.
When told that Biden, or any other candidate, is electable, we should remember that while some broad trends about electability, such as the danger of Democratic insider resume candidates, can be discerned, electability is often a very slippery concept, that usually also falls victim to intellectual laziness and tautology. Candidates are electable because they win, so once a president is elected a backstory about electability is filled in. For example, we now “know” that Hillary Clinton was unelectable, but if 80,000 or so votes in a few key states had gone differently in 2016, the pundits would have explained that Hillary Clinton was electable because of her experience, centrist policies and calm temperament and that Donald Trump’s bigotry and mental instability scared off too many voters and made him unelectable. The problem with this approach to electability is that it is not predictive. It is not a theory; rather, it is essentially just political kibitzing both before and after the election.
In the last few weeks, Seth Moulton, John Hickenlooper, Kirsten Gillibrand and Jay Inslee have dropped out of the Democratic primary campaign for president. Hickenlooper and Inslee both had resumes that in previous elections could have made them frontrunners for the nomination, but their campaigns never got any traction this year. Both also immediately turned their attention to other elections. Inslee will seek a third term as governor of Washington while Hickenlooper will run for the Senate in Colorado against Republican incumbent Cory Gardner. Moulton, like Eric Swalwell a few weeks earlier, has decided to run for his safe congressional seat rather than continue a presidential campaign he had almost no chance of winning. Gillibrand will return to the Senate.
As the 2020 election approaches, we will inevitably encounter more commentary reminding us how the future of the US is at stake. That is clearly true, because if Donald Trump is reelected the pace of democratic rollback will be accelerated, perhaps irrevocably, while a Democratic victory may just reverse that rollback and make it possible to rebuild a cohesive and democratic country. However, despite the future being at stake, the election itself will largely be a debate about the past.
Over the last few election cycles we have learned pretty definitively that we know a lot less about electability than we think we do. Our last two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, were both viewed as axiomatically unelectable when they began their campaigns for the White House. Moreover, most candidates have both positive and negative and electoral traits so their overall electability becomes a post facto assessment rather than having any predictive value. For example, in 2016 Hillary Clinton was very electable until she wasn’t. Similarly, had John Kerry beat George W. Bush in 2004, the punditry would have explained that as a war hero with years of experience he was the perfect candidate, but he lost narrowly, so we have been told he was a northeaster liberal with limited charisma and therefore a week candidate. Given this, when somebody tells you they think a particular primary candidate is electable, what they usually mean is simply that they are supporting that candidate.