Joe Biden chose a good time to become president.

Joe Biden may have been lucky enough to have the perfect time to become President of the United States.

It is not that he received an easy hand, exactly. The coronavirus did not disappear. A large number of Americans remain unemployed. The conservative movement is actively waging a state-to-state war against voting, as it adopts an increasingly explicitly anti-democratic philosophy. There are many historical challenges that require a skillful response.

But it is now clear that Biden will benefit enormously from the favorable winds that were blowing well before he took office, which could help him achieve the kind of historic presidency he clearly craves.

See Friday’s big news about the economy: after a winter hibernation, the job market came to life again in March, with employers hiring 916,000 workers, the largest since last August. Depending on which vehicle you read, the numbers crush, exceed or simply exceed analysts’ expectations. The country still lacks about 8.4 million jobs compared to the period before the crisis, but the recovery seems to be returning, possibly forever. As the chief economist at Bank of America said, “The tide is turning.”

Did Biden’s leadership have anything to do with this spring awakening? I mean, it is possible. Perhaps its calming public presence, the promise of a major economic stimulus and an accelerated launch of vaccines (more on that in a minute) have given companies a renewed sense of confidence. Furthermore, it probably can’t hurt that the lunatic who often encouraged his supporters to break public health rules when they weren’t busy attacking the Capitol is now out of office.

But given that the ink on the government’s $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus account at the time the job numbers were collected has not dried up, it seems unlikely that the White House really deserves so much credit for this sudden boom. It probably had a lot more to do with the relief bill passed by Congress in December, which boosted personal income by sending $ 600 checks and renewing federal unemployment insurance, as well as providing a new round of aid. small businesses to keep the staff employed. The government put more money in Americans’ pockets and they spent it.

The climate was also almost certain, too: low temperatures led to significant job losses in the leisure and hospitality sector in winter – especially in restaurants and bars that came to depend on outdoor meals and drinks. With rising temperatures, so did these industries. Biden is skilled at many things, but controlling the atmosphere is not one of them.

Finally, the sharp decline in coronavirus cases after their post-holiday increases probably also helped. Part of this can be credited to the vaccination effort and part can be explained by a natural fall after the Americans stopped traveling and returned home after spending Christmas breathing with their loved ones.

Now, about those vaccines. The Biden government has undoubtedly taken a more active and practical role in the nation’s COVID response compared to the Trump White House, and the results appear to have been good. We are currently getting an average of almost 3 million vaccines a day, compared to an average of almost 900,000 when Biden took office, and the government now says it expects enough vaccine available for each adult by the end of May.

According to almost all reports, the White House’s current efforts are partly responsible for putting us at that pace. The president took steps to increase production, such as invoking the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer increase his production, and sending vaccines more quickly, such as sending doses directly to pharmacies. Not all of her ideas seem to have worked as expected – the FEMA-run mass vaccination sites she set up do not seem to be as popular – but Biden clearly took charge of the situation.

At the same time, Biden also clearly reaped the benefits of the seeds planted in the last administration. As the New York Times explained last month, “the new administration has expanded and stepped up a vaccine production effort whose key elements were present when Biden took over.” The Washington Post reporters explained pretty much the same thing in an article entitled “‘Completing the deal’: the Biden vaccine wins are based on the work of the Trump team.”

As part of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump White House has blocked enough vaccine supplies to cover at least 200 million adults, in part thanks to its clever strategy of signing contracts with several drug manufacturers while clinical trials were in progress and after an unstable start, began to accelerate distribution. A day after Biden took the oath of office, health professionals administered more than 1 million vaccines – suggesting that the country was already on track to meet the original government’s 100 million vaccine target in 100 days.

As for the increase in production? Biden took steps that helped: struck a deal with Johnson & Johnson for the company’s factory to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for example. But the Times suggests that the biggest factor is just that Moderna and Pfizer have had time to improve and speed up bottle production for their new product.

The Biden administration painted this situation very differently, suggesting that its predecessors left no vaccine distribution plan in place and forced them to start “from scratch”. There is a small grain of truth to that statement – the Trump team’s approach was essentially to send vaccines to states and let local authorities discover the rest with little guidance. But the idea that Biden and his team were building from nothing is ultimately overkill. They refined a vaccination effort that already seemed to be gaining momentum.

To be more clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Biden is just taking credit for Trump’s successes. There is absolutely no guarantee that the vaccine launch would be going so well if the carnival spreader was still in charge. Nor am I trying to suggest that the economy would be fine without the $ 1.9 trillion that Congress just injected into it; the bill passed in December was only meant to be a bridge until spring – its unemployment benefits were set to expire in March – and it is entirely possible that, in an alternative universe where Republicans still controlled much of Washington, spending by families would be on the verge of falling again with the cut in unemployment spending. Furthermore, politically, Republicans can’t really complain if Biden claims a little more credit than he should have: after all, Trump has spent years claiming to have made the economy great again, although he has largely come out of the slow-but-recovery of stable jobs that started with Barack Obama. (Trump deserved credit for installing inflation as the Fed chairman and injecting short-term stimulus into the economy with tax cuts and deficit spending, but that’s about it.)

With all these caveats and caveats aside, however, the fact of the matter is that both the economy and our national response to the plague seemed to be turning a corner when Biden arrived. It is a far better situation than the one that, say, the Obama administration faced in early 2009, when each month still brought an apparently catastrophic wave of job losses. At the same time, we are still mired in a crisis that is continuous enough to create the opportunity for historic and permanent change. Biden has already passed a huge humanitarian aid bill that may have laid the groundwork for a long-term revolution in the way we fight child poverty. And this week, he presented a $ 2 trillion economic modernization plan that would rebuild and decarbonize much of the country’s infrastructure. If it weren’t for the sense of urgency created by COVID and the way the United States’ perception of government spending has changed, it seems unlikely that Democratic moderates in Congress would be entertaining something remotely so ambitious. For any politician interested in being remembered by future generations, this was a good time to take the reins.