Biden Goes For The Reset, Will It Work?
Hello Hackaroos,
Well, it was a long time coming, but President Biden finally pushed the reset button on his agenda with a nearly two-hour press conference on Wednesday. He finally seems to be listening to us (we’re sure of it!) about breaking things up, rather than going for the entire Build Back Better agenda in one go. Pragmatism over perfection as he begins his second year. That’s where we begin before we turn to the future of Trump-ism and tidbits.
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Let’s begin…
111 MINUTES LATER… WHERE DOES PRESIDENT BIDEN’S AGENDA GO FROM HERE?
GIBBS: After watching President Biden’s press conference and reading the reactions, I give the President a mixed grade – a lesser one for his overall execution during the news conference, a better one for what he signaled lies ahead for him and his Administration. I told a few reporters that the news conference shouldn’t dwell on what happened in month 2 or 3 of his term because that’s not how people skeptical of Presidential actions process approval. It was smart to be humble and acknowledge actions such as more testing for COVID had to be done and that, overall, more work was needed to deal with American’s anxiety around the pandemic, their children’s schools possibly closing, inflation and other challenges. I think he would have been better served to flash empathy rather than seeking acknowledgement about past accomplishments (though I get that’s hard with President’s defending their tenure). In the end, one performance at a press conference, even if it lasted almost two hours, was only going to have an excruciatingly small impact.
What I did think the event and President Biden’s words foreshadowed were that he would make important changes and do things differently. I very much liked that pretty early on it was clear he was going to punch at the Republicans for what they weren't proposing or what plan they didn't have. It starts to set up the rubric for a bit of a better, more forceful political strategy in 2022. Saying he wanted to stop being the President of the Senate or that he wanted to get out more in the country was good and long overdue. And, finally, I think an acknowledgement that he clearly reads us, pushing a smaller Build Back Better plan and then acknowledging, even if painful for his political allies to hear, what won’t likely be in that legislation is important to set the tone and the plan for the next few months. We should say here that the idea of breaking BBB into chunks and getting it passed isn’t going to happen as Speaker Pelosi said Thursday because that process doesn’t allow for the use of reconciliation (read: passing items with 50 votes). Instead, those chunks can be filibustered. But, a smaller plan can be achieved, I believe. Get the money for climate and clean energy, make permanent the help in buying affordable health insurance through Obamacare and fund 10 years of early childhood education. Fund it with changes that make prescription drugs cheaper and increasing taxes on the wealthy and big corporations. It’s not $10 trillion or $6 trillion or even $3.5 trillion, but it would make a big difference. It would be big progress.
As for the rest, run that through the Senate, have it filibustered, die and take it to the campaign to fight out for all to see!
Again, he was never going to entirely reset the narrative (let alone his entire Presidency) in one news conference, but I think there's at least the skeleton of a plan going forward.
MURPHY: Yeah, I would say he's better off today than he was the day before the press conference. Better to wobble toward a reset than to continue wobbling toward electoral disaster. That said, Biden’s performance wasn’t great. He hit a few singles and even a double or two. It was time for the POTUS to admit that BBB was done and it is time to chop it up into more understandable chunks that he can either pass with Manchin or campaign over. His biggest screw up was the Ukraine gaffe where rather than hitting the ball, he threw the bat and wound up clobbering the umpire. Not good and a low point. I also think he made a big tonal mistake with the “everything is great here are the stats dammit” tone… polling data is very clear that most people think otherwise between COVID and inflation. So it was a mixed bag, but ultimately a forward lurch toward a reset and that’s what he really needs. Biden is limited as a performance politician, so on the Biden capability scale, I’d give it a B+. Now he just needs a fast clean up with a very big mop on aisle Ukraine.
In this election year, it’s now pretty simple in my view. Biden needs wins. So chopping down the scope of the stuff to get something done is what now counts most.
TRUMP-ISM: TO BE OR NOT TO BE? THAT IS THE QUESTION.
Credit: ROBYN BECK / AFP
MURPHY: Meanwhile, much is afoot in the dark precincts of Trump land. First, the Supreme Court really dropped the atomic elbow on Trump’s tissue paper thin legal attempt to block the January 6th Committee's investigation into his behavior, citing that golden oldie executive privilege. That, along with the sedition charges against those knuckleheads in the Oath keepers, have made this a true week of legal disaster for team MAGA at any cost. It’s bad news for Trump. Good news for America.
Finally, there's a new poll out from NBC News, which reinforces something I've been talking about for a while on our podcast; inside the GOP electorate Trump is in a slow but steady decline. (Cut to chortles from Axe.) But the numbers don’t lie: the poll shows a strong majority of rank-and-file Republicans now say their allegiance is the party, instead of solely to Trump.
The big orange iceberg is slowly melting in the sun. The question is, how slowly and what does it mean for 2024? Have no doubt as of today, Trump is still the dominant figure in the GOP. But politics is ever changing and the trend is clear… Trump is in decline.
GIBBS: My question for you Murphy is, if Trump is going away, what is the political health of Trump-ism and what exactly is the GOP these days? Are they really even distinguishable? Because isn’t Ron DeSantis just Florida’s version of Donald Trump? Maybe we find out what happened in the 2016 primaries when Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to out-Trump Donald Trump and it didn't work at all. So I'm interested in if the allegiance is greater to the party, what's the pulse on the political health of the Republican Party and does it look anything like what you and I grew up with or what it looked like in 2012?!
MURPHY: That my dear Gibbs, is the BIG question because if Trump is declining, what does that mean for Trump-ism? I don't know. What I would note at this early point is Trump believes what he believes because he's crazy and filled with anger and grievances. The Trump imitators like DeSantis, Hawley and the rest are a bit different. They see the Trumpism stuff as a tactic to help them win future GOP primaries. All they believe in is their own careerism. They're very capable of morphing chameleon like into something new if they cynically see a change up as being in their own self-interest. So if Trumpism fades, my guess is the ersatz Trumps will reinvent themselves as well.
GIBBS: Well, Murphy, I think radiologists around the country are currently scheduling X-rays to figure out who's got a spine. Jokes aside, I think the future of Trump-ism and what happens next for your Grand Old Party, Murphy, is something we’re going to be Hacking about this year and many more to come.
TIDBITS
MURPHY: On a very sad note, the all-powerful woke-stapo has now succeeded where the ferocious Barbary Coast pirates and hawk-eyed Spanish army riflemen of San Juan Hill all failed. They took out Teddy Roosevelt. Earlier this week and naturally under the cover of darkness the famous statue of Roosevelt that stood outside the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan for 90 years was removed and shipped off to North Dakota. TR, it seems, is part of an American history that now requires a thick new coat of politically correct Day-Glo paint in bright woke yellow. I was all for sending Confederate monuments to far corners of dusty museum basements, but Teddy Roosevelt? Stupid and tragic.
GIBBS: It brings to mind that San Francisco is currently recalling three members of the Board of Education who spent the dire days of closed schools during COVID renaming schools rather than worrying about keeping them open. I'm all for putting Robert E. Lee deep into the bowels of the museum or disregarding him and his like altogether. At best that's where he belongs, but when we are thinking about removing statues for Lincoln and Grant, I tend to believe we might be reading history a little too critically.
We’ll see you on Tuesday, including with some answers to your mail bag questions. Keep them coming! Have a great weekend!
Murphy and Gibbs