The Biden Administration is churning along on its various projects but things are in stasis, at the moment, because the fruits of their endeavors have not yet arrived with the exception of that easy one that occurred early on when the Recovery Act passed and, among other things, provided jobs for health care workers and cops, and gave everyone a fourteen hundred dollar check, and covered the costs of Covid relief. Not minor but the real test is whether Biden will get his infrastructure bill and his family plan, both of which should result whether from bipartisanship or reconciliation in late summer. As it is, there is no movement on the George Floyd Act to deal with police violence, where negotiators are still negotiating and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems to be getting nowhere however much Biden says he is strongly in favor of those two bills. So Biden will either be a great success and run in the midterms on his success at the infrastructure and family bills, a tribute that government can work in spite of the fifty fifty tie in the Senate and only a majority of a handful in the House, or he will be a failed President, in which case the Republicans who had blocked his efforts will run against him as a do nothing President. Either a hero or a failure rather than just middling with just some accomplishments along with his defeats. So we all wait and think that the very fabric of democracy is in the balance in that a Republican majority in Congress, most Republicans still not having pledged itself to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and those Republicans might do any number of deplorable matters though. like as not, will do not very much other than allow states to undercut democratic elections because doing nothing and being obstructionist is what Republicans have done for a while, even before Trump, in that their creed is no longer balancing the budget or being aggressive at foreign powers or fighting the cultural wars like abortion, the last issue to be dealt with next year by the Supreme Court when its 6-3 majority will likely seriously curtail the right to an abortion just as this year it seriously curtailed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, leaving only the possibility that the Biden Attorney General will cleverly find a way to sue states for voting rights incursions even though the Supreme Court limited that by saying these suits had to be significant and cognizant of the need to avoid voter fraud even though the Court never had to say the states had to show there had indeed to be voter fraud before restrictions to protect it from happening occurred. The Supreme Court is not simply wrong headed; it is fatuous. So we wait and so have foreboding about what will happen when events break.Meanwhile, I get some solace, despite my anxieties, for watching the Biden Administration perform itself so smoothly. It is a pleasure to watch given the chaos of the Trump Administration when that President made off the cuff and erratic and wrong and lying remarks and performances and his Executive Branch was understaffed or ever changing or riddled with ideologues and ignorant people and Trump, for the nation’s relief, was not able to control the reins of government because he didn’t know how to and so could do trivial things by clearing rioters so he could have a photo op at a church, to no effect, although reports have it that he did plan to undermine institutions, while only undercutting Bill Barr and his predecessor because of the only parochial concern over whether the two of them had supported him in the investigations by Congress of his misdeeds. No big policy agenda. Just a wall to nowhere and giving money to rich people, that last something Republicans always like to do so as to get reelected to office.
Biden has a fully staffed and well working staff, which was also the case with Obama and George W. Bush and most other previous presidents. Nicole Wallace, now an MSNBC commentator but once the head of the press office for W., could recognize herself as having taken the hits when W.’s weapons of mass destruction didn’t unfold as expected, but she did what a press secretary does, which is explain as best what one can do rather than just offer bluster and vituperation and lies as did the various Trump press secretaries. It is refreshing to hear the machinery of government churning again. I like to listen to Jen Psaki doing her job which is never to make flashy statements on her own but letting the President do so, even if he is rarely flashy even if exact and truthful in what he says and deflecting comments with a “I don’t have anything more to add at this moment”. She says very little, which is her job, more a set of announcements of the topics that concern the Administration, like the fact that there is hacking going on from Russian criminal gangs, while saying nothing substantive about it, Jen having an easier job of it than she might have if the press gaggle in the White House had more substantive questions to ask rather than whether the Vice President will this week go to the Rio Grande. Well, she did, and so that issue was over with. The crisis at the border ceases to be a border crisis when the press no longer has anything to ask about it.
Biden is extremely well briefed. There are also numerous interagency meetings of high level officials to deliberate what to do next and then percolate up to the President what he might do. The Administration seems responsible which is, as I say, what is ordinarily the case in Administrations. The question is whether it makes a difference. Is the Administration making progress at its goals because it is now, again, so carefully honed? Yes, there is less bluster in the off again then on again romance between Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, and no no new missile tests at the moment, but is that of Biden’s doing in that he cut a deal with North Korea or China to control the North or did Pompeo manage that in the previous Administration? The Biden Administration wants to restart the Iran deal and there have been numerous meetings about that issue but the tough nut to crack, I think, will be getting some limitation on Iran missiles so as to get an enhanced deal that will satisfy Republicans and achieve both controls over nuclear weapons and get Iranian sanctions lifted while the U. S. lets the Israelis do to Iran whatever it is they do. Yes, NATO and European leadership had a relaxed good time with one another now that Trump was gone of his uninformed view that the U. S. should get something for U. S. money spent on NATO when in fact what the U. S. was getting for its money peace in Europe ever since World War II, which is seventy five years and a longer time of peace than Europe had ever seen in its history. Cheap at the price. But Biden has not kept the edge of Russia to calm down in its threats to Ukraine, or has it? Quiet diplomacy, after all, is secret. It happens when it results in nothing happening.
If foreign policy is, for the moment, secret diplomacy, with the exception of Afghanistan where Biden was steely enough to decide to get out of Afghanistan despite the fact that the Taliban would take over and do terrible restrictions on women and other liberalizing forces because Biden did not think it responsible to sacrifice American and allied troops to a hopelessly corrupt and unsustainable regime (wasn’t twenty years enough to stand up the Kabul government?) and most of the other foreign policy issues are not very significant until some confrontation between the United States and China that has to be managed in twenty years or so, and because we have to wait and see if domestic policy bills get passed (which is different from prior domestic policy initiatives in that Biden offers money and money works to get things done as happened when Social Security and Medicare made the old no longer part of the poor, while long term effects, which is what happened with the War on Poverty, which did not alleviate poverty, as later evaluations years later showed), then I am again reduced to looking at process so as to evaluate what Biden has done so far. Biden picked a first class Cabinet and included unusual choices. The Secretary of Energy has often been given to a nuclear physicist because that office supervises atomic weapons and so Munoz played a part in Kerry’s Iran Nuclear Deal. But this time Biden picked Jennifer Granholm as Energy Secretary who is an articulate and smart political figure, once two term Governor of Michigan, perhaps because the office will pivot onto dealing with oil prices and so is presently managing OPEC’s difficulty at sorting itself out post pandemic. Biden also picked Gina Raimondo as Secretary of Commerce, usually a conservative political appointment ever since it was established in tandem back in 1903 as the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, But Raimondo had been very proactive as Governor of Rhode Island in managing the early months of coronavirus, sealing the state's borders when she thought she had to, and so Biden might think her services useful when one of Commerce’s bundle of areas, perhaps having to do with climate change, come to the fore, in that Commerce contains the weather service. Biden thinks ahead. As I suggested in an earlier post, there is no list of central things for the Attorney General to do, from prosecuting insurrectionists to dealing with voting lawsuits, and Garland is up to that task. And Mayor Pete who has made Transportation an integral part of the infrastructure bill and he does very well at handling the Conservatives at Fox News. Is Mayor Pete a Presidential aspirant a few iterations away? That would be a phenomenal advance from sick deviants in the Fifties to the White House in, let us say, 2040. I can’t wait-- and probably won’t, my own term of office probably expired.
So I now take the entertainment, the pleasure, of those press conferences. I note the other day Psaki said that the Federal Government does not get frustrated with the slow rate of recent inoculations. All the government does is try to push the programs that will increase vaccinations. So there will be more pharmacies and pediatricians who will have the vaccine available because it is so convenient to do so and especially if a trusted advisor is there to say vaccination is a good thing. Psaki is clear not to blame those who refuse to get vaccinated, just mentioning the demographic groups, such as the young, and the geographical groups, such as in the South, which have much lower rates of vaccination. Politics with the exception of Trump doesnt blame the citizenry for its failures, however clear to me and most that antivaxers are stupid, ignorent, politically bioased. or all three, but that is the right tack for the government to take. The government should provide a service not a judgment, however much Biden, in his low key remarks the other day, said that getting vaccinated was the patriotic thing to do, something a right winger might rant and rave about if it were a left winger who had transgressed. Meanwhile, Psaki reels off about agricultural initiatives and other matters she shouldn’t have to spoon feed her press audience, but it shows the government at work and kills time while waiting for significant events to take place. Government is mostly humdrum and satisfying for that reason. I don’t want wars and other cataclysms.