At the White House’s Rose Garden, where Donald Trump loudly celebrated political victories with his allies for four years, it was now the Democrats’ turn to take the win – masked and physically distant, of course.
Kamala Harris, the vice president, praised Joe Biden for signing a $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, the largest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “His empathy has become a hallmark of his presidency and can be found on every page of the American Rescue Plan,” said Harris.
Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting shot for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, traveling across the country to directly tell Americans how hard-won legislation will improve their lives.
Salesmanship has always been seen as Trump’s forte, but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a previously unlikely savior. The oldest elected president – at 78 – is on the rise in opinion polls. His bailout plan is endorsed by three out of four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter-narrative, fighting for Trump and obsessed with cultural wars.
But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start to rise inevitably fall. He also spoke about the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama, who, having intervened to prevent financial disaster in 2009, was rewarded with a “grenade” for Democrats in the midterm elections.
Politics has to do with momentum, and with vaccines coming quickly, the economy set to grow back and jump in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political adviser and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush governments, said: “In politics, the good gets better, the bad gets worse. Biden is in a difficult situation right now, so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and to be seen everywhere.
“They want to receive the credit and it must. The tides will change; there will be periods when they seem to be unable to do anything right. “
In what the White House calls the Help is Here tour, First Lady Jill Biden is due to travel to Burlington, New Jersey on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain in the west and make a stopover in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.
At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip to Atlanta, where Democrats’ victories in two Senate run-off elections in January were essential to the approval of the aid package against the inflexible Republican opposition.
The White House acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a ride for the win. “We paid a price for that, ironically, for that humility,” he said.
That price included a reaction in the form of the Tea Party movement and an increase in right-wing populism. But there were important differences in both substance and style. Obama’s $ 787 billion note, which followed the bank bailout, provided a recovery that seemed abstract and glacial. This time, the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a stimulus payment of $ 1,400 this weekend, with mass vaccinations and the reopening of schools on the way.
Bill Galston, a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington and a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the 2009 experience was etched in the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of being too small and paying the price. price on a painfully slow recovery, spending a lot of time in the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who would never agree and never compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.
“The list of lessons learned is very long and, in a way that I find surprising, the government is reevaluating and winning the past war.
Despite avoiding financial collapse, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest change since 1948. This fits a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to do poorly. in the first legislative elections, and therefore Republicans are optimistic about their chances of winning the House and Senate back next year.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior Obama adviser, argues that Covid’s relief project is the start of the battle for 2022 mid-term assessments and warns that Democrats cannot take credit for granted, as Americans “currently have the memory of term of a sea cucumber ”.
He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that, despite Obama’s speeches and visits to the factories, “it was almost impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news.” But “the benefits of this plan are more specific, more easily understood and are likely to be felt widely in a short time.”
Pfeiffer asked grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the effort to exchange messages through social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because few people knew about how Barack Obama helped prevent the economy from plunging into a second Great Depression,” he added. “We are not going to do that again.”
The plan will also require strict supervision to ensure that money is not spent incorrectly or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former acting chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a huge bill with huge consequences, but it requires not only the president, the vice president and the cabinet, but the state and local governments also work together to ensure that vaccines are distributed equitably and ordinary citizens can take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill. “
There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historical legislation and Dr. Seuss’s fixation on Republicans to “cancel culture” after the children’s publisher announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist images for confusion over whether Mr. Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr.”.
The issue, which often gets more coverage in the conservative media than in relieving the coronavirus, is seen as a way to liven up the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of whom seem to have vaccinated him against demonization by the right-wing attack machine.
And despite their popularity with the public, all Republican senators opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It will be interesting to see how much they will do about the benefits of the plan compared to the Republicans not having voted for the plan.”
Chen, director of policies for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats will be when the elements of it emerge that will be unpopular, will it be defined by the things that are unpopular or by the things that would appear to be politically quite favorable? ”
The OECD predicts that the bailout plan will help the US economy grow at a rate of 6.5% this year, which would be the fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But, like Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair found out, all political honeymoons have come to an end.
Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack, accusing the president of ignoring the growing crisis of a sudden increase in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare burst of unity among Democrats – at Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is unlikely to last. And the next important item on the legislative’s wish list, infrastructure, is likely to be even more difficult.
But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that can make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, said: “They are betting on an economic recovery and I hope they are right because I want the US economy to recover quickly.”
But, he added, “I think people will continue to learn more about things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid’s relief or economic stimulus. There is definitely a real risk of blowback. “
Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public relations consultancy, added: “We could be on the verge of a new 1920s with an expanding economy and so much pent-up demand from people to travel, live and spend money. We may also be preparing the bomb for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is usually the number one issue in an election and there is a very real chance that we will have a big advantage or some dangers ahead. “