Jubilation for Biden is never what I expected weeks ago much less in the past few days as Biden expects to slowly and confidently move towards a Biden very close victory. Actually, my response to the election before hand and now is relief rather than elation. There were so many things that might have gone very wrong: massive irregularities, mischievous lawsuits, violence sufficiently anticipated so that Washington and New York City have boarded up buildings. But local elections did their jobs by methodically and calmly keeping to the election system, showing that the American people, despite these four years, are a people with a genius for government, just as the British had done in the Nineteenth Century and before and after. There is something to be said for the Electoral College making the legitimate choice certain and soon and for letting local districts control their precincts by administering calm and peaceful and even handed voting. I saw Ohio being orderly even though the voting is split just about the middle.
What was unsettling was how close it is and will be to call. Almost all of the states did what they did in 2016 except that the three battleground states flipped back again (assuming Biden gets Pennsylvania) from Republican to Democratic, as if nothing much had happened in the past few years that might make people decide to shift their preferences. The voters are oblivious to the facts, even if there is coronavirus, a bad economy and a very unpresidential incumbent. The fact is that the divisions of the two parties are remarkably stable and have been since before the Civil War, with the exception of the New Deal Regime that lasted from 1932 to 1968, which looks an ever shrinking period of time. The Old Confederacy plus the Plains states plus the upper Mountain states support the Republicans while the old Union plus the Pacific rim states enhanced by the southern mountain states such as Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico side with the Democrats. We are still a deeply divided country.
The wisdom of Paul Lazaarsfeld, who had designed the polling system that had accurately predicted presidential elections from 1940 to 2016, when Hillary was correctly predicted to win the popular vote and had said of state polls that Trump was a bit behind but closing in the last few days, predicted this time that Biden should have won a solid though not overwhelming margin, and that didn’t happen. The voters stubbornly refused not to change their minds. Pollsters will have to figure out what got wrong in that regional areas are more important than other demographic ones. On the other hand, given how close are the opposing sides in any number of states, it may be something other than even regionalism is not at play. It may be just hordes of people affiliated with their cultural rather than their structural interests.
Lazarsfeld also had a point of view to accompany his technology of polling. He thought that elections were liberated from ideology, from the talk of electioneering, because people voted like a religion in that they followed, tried and true, to their demographics. But the inverse of that liberty is that people are set in their ways, so disregarding issues that nothing else matters, even deciding to accept as President so unpalatable a person as Trump, his supporters allowing themselves the secondary gain of enjoying to hear them flap their lips with venom. My major misgiving is that Trump might have been reelected if there had been no coronavirus to turn some people off. What explains the venom of so many people, as I have said before, when there are few explanations for it? There is no war to speak of, the economy before the coronavirus was doing fine, and social issues seemed to have settled down. Maybe apocalyptic thinking is deep in the culture, Democrats dreaming about climate change transfiguring the world, while Republicans think that Black outrages will lead to a race rebellion. It all transcends politics when I used to think that politics had to do with the urgency of reality, whether rational or irrational, rather than politics an expression of deeper cultural feelings.
But, behat as it may, a President has the full authority of his office even if it was a close one, and we can now newly anticipate what can now be rolled out as a much more developed to-do list for Biden that will prove to be very difficult politically given the new make-up of the Senate, even if many of them seem urgent, at least to those among center-liberals. So here is the list of the top tasks that have to be prioritized according to what comes first when so many of them have to start as soon as Biden becomes President-- assuming that Trump will not intervene to gum up the works during the transition. Even the offer of a Presidential Pardon by Biden if Trump behaves himself is not likely to deter him from his irrepressible impulses. We will see.
The first thing is to control the coronavirus. Letting states take the initiative has clearly not been a successful strategy in that the infection is spreading everywhere and reaching ever higher rates of infection, though it seems that the death rate is a bit declining, perhaps because of either more effective management of the disease or because a less vulnerable population is getting the disease. Biden should require masks and separation wherever is allowed by law and use his bully pulpit to encourage and to shame people into complying, and use enabling laws to get through congress to effectuate a public health measure that has been workable, after all, for five or six hundred years, ever since the time of the Black Plague. This is no Constitutional issue of free speech or assembly. Ron Klain might become a czar for coronavirus, and so create other than the false Pence taskforce, but Klain might become chief of staff to Biden, having been Biden’s chief of staff when he was Vice President. One of the first jobs of a coronavirus czar will be to lay out the assignments of coronavirus vaccines so that they are, first of all, reliably tested, and then assigned to appropriate priorities, such as the elderly, health care workers, and other vulnerable populations, such as African Americans, in a manner that seems objective rather than political, the taint of Trump making people suspicious that everything is political.
Some things can be done quickly because they are matters of executive order or within the prerogatives of the President. So it is easy to join the Paris Climate accord as an easy gesture whereby the United States reasserts its solidarity with the Europeans. Much more complicated will be whatever tariff arrangements are worked out with Great Britain when it leaves the European Union. It is easy to arrange to secure DACA recipients from being displaced and to become less draconian about border refugees, but it will be much harder to work out a long term immigration policy, perhaps waiting for the Republicans to reassemble and finally go with their 2012 suggestion that the party has to broaden its constituencies. Marco Rubio’s single bright idea is to try to get Hispanics to go Republican and he can do that if he is the one who insists on the long term deal that Trump had accepted before he rejected it.
The Pelosi Heroes Act has to get promptly passed so as to keep the economy going for the short term. That very ample spending will provide people to get through the winter and stabilize the economy until Biden can get around with rebuilding the economy, sustaining it for the long run, with his Green New Deal to provide work for solar panels and wind turbines and other jobs for the middle class that Biden so admires. That will be difficult to get through Congress because the Republicans and the Democrats will be very close to one another and it is questionable whether there will be any less partisanship in the Senate and also because Senators like Joe Manchin will hold a legislation up to get some West Virginia pork, as will some others, this a usual process that seems less distasteful because it is a return to usual politics.
Then there will have to be a pause on the rest of the agenda having to do with expanding Obamacare and rebuilding the infrastructure with roads and rail, however much they are part of Biden’s goals, so as to deal with some pressing issues that have arisen because of the Supreme Court. By that time, the Supreme Court will have overturned though not yet eliminated Obamacare and so the Congress will have to pass new legislation authorizing Obamacare so that it will now meet constitutional muster. There will be a fight over whether to use the opportunity to keep the present program in place, slightly rationalize it and so make it so difficult to administer, or expand it to include the public option. Again, just a few Democratic Senators, even if the Democrats had a majority, can block the door and so, incremental and modest as I ever am, would opt for Obamacare as is, if that can get through expeditiously though here the left wing, which includes Elizabeth Warren, who will stay in the Senate because of the Democrats slim majority, given that the Republican Governor of Massachusetts would name her replacement. There was little to believe as the now defeated Trump supporters did that she would become the Secretary of the Treasury. Moreover, she is not a money person but a bankruptcy expert, and centrist Joe Biden will go with a Wall Street type for Treasury, as Democrats and Republicans have done since Bill Clinton. Warren will pressure for a bigger plan, but it won’t happen. I have no guess of what the Republicans will do if they keep the Senate and are faced with deciding on Obamacare.
The other Supreme Court issue will be the repeal or the significant tightening of abortion. It would be necessary to pass national legislation to make sure that abortion is available in all the states, whether the Southern states like it or not. This will allow Republicans to reassert themselves as a side on the culture wars. Biden will have so many irons in the fire that he might find a compromise so as to get on with other things. Perhaps individual state legislatures will be allowed to buy out of abortion in the last trimester or only for a medical emergency. Managing the legislative agenda, here as elsewhere, will be very tricky. What will Republicans do if they are no longer beholden to Trump.
That means that a great many issues who need to be addressed will not be addressed, even if he survives his first term, and there is no reason to think that a responsible Republican, such as Chris Christie or Marco Rubio, might upend Kamala Harris, charming as she may be. The one I think is brewing is the issue of how to deal with social media. I think it should be like a newspaper proprietorship, beholden to its owners as to what it can print, rather than a utility, like the telephone, which is neutral about subject matter. But that is very complicated and I would like to see a wise head or two to inspect the matter, perhaps as an Attorney General because that office is concerned with anti-trust and free speech. The trouble is that the Attorney General will at first focus on passing a law to restrict police atrocities, as well it should. Jah Johnson, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, may be the person that fits the bill for both issues.
Meanwhile, let us luxuriate in the fact that we have missed the bullet of a second term for Trump, his unending penchant for mischief rather than just moving the nation forward, which is what most Presidents do, as best they can. There will be plenty of time to consider how Biden chooses wrong or miscalculates about what to do in the executive branch or with dealing with Congress. Also be grateful that Trump, having started bellicose, calmed down enough to follow the Obama foreign policy, which very solidly supports keping Europe at the edge of Russia and staying out of the Middle East. Biden may revive the Trans Pacific Partnership, which he has long favored as creating a tariff regime on our design rather than a tariff plan designed by China, but domestic issues are likely to be the subject matter for the new term, as is the default position usually.