Joe Biden has the floor - and Kamala Harris
Joe Biden, salutary breakup, is "the adult in the room" after four years of Trumpian infantilism and ignorance. An adult who will have a lot on his shoulders. His presidency will inevitably stumble, given the magnitude of the combined crises that his government must curb - health, economic, political, climate ... We will not only want him to "forge compromises", as he has repeatedly insisted on. campaign in the name of the appeasement of American political life, but that it is also capable of foresight and lasting progress. American democracy - but not that it - really needs it.
He was there, Wednesday noon on Capitol Hill, surrounded by the Bush sons, Clinton and Obama, masked ex-presidents, in a reassuring picture of a return to a certain normality, of the reaffirmation of the democratic norm, when in fact nothing isn't really normal in these times of a pandemic - Mr. Biden taking an oath in a capital freed from Trump's unhealthy presence, at the same time as still besieged, at least symbolically, by the far-right nebula.
At 78, Mr. Biden has the head and formatted verb of a politician from another era, with a 50-year career and pots in his suitcases. But here he is, at the end of the day, in the role of a president who is expected to be that of a modernizer. Which is expected to help turn this America in black and white into America in color - which America becomes anyway, whether the supremacists like it or not. It will not be enough for him to want to repair, he said so in his swearing-in speech, he will also have to push forward.
Says Irish Oscar Wilde, Irish as the Biden family is by birth: "Progress is only the fulfillment of utopias."
The next few years will measure its determination - and its own evolution. It has ambitious projects in its boxes, particularly in health and immigration. The man has heart, which is already a lot, given the one who is leaving. That said, without rose-colored glasses. For the men and women with whom he has surrounded himself so far, starting with Kamala Harris as vice-president, he is in any case showing the project of being a more progressive president, he who nevertheless grew up within from the right wing of the Democratic Party. While it is obviously a question of undoing the damage done by Donald Trump (in the environment, in international relations ...) and of "building back better", in accordance with his slogan, Mr. Biden also gives encouraging signs of wanting to break this which Barack Obama did not do, with the business that has undermined the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton.
From now on, the floor is his. And in Congress, where the Democrats have a small majority for two years. And to the left wing of the party, which finally has a voice. And Ms. Harris, of course, because it is a lot to her that we will be interested, the first woman and the first mixed race to become vice-president, based on the probability that she will be a candidate for the presidency in 2024 .
Things are going to have to move quickly. The new president was to immediately sign a series of emblematic decrees: reinstatement of the Paris Agreement, repeal of the infamous anti-Muslim migration decree adopted by Trump in 2016 ... Nothing is obviously more urgent than to stem the pandemic, which Trump has continued to minimize, and to vote for a third economic aid plan (at stratospheric height of 1900 billion US $). The new president will not have too much of the 100 days he has given himself to do so.
Donald Trump was the elephant in the room on this beautiful sunny Wednesday. Wrapped in uniquely American rhetoric, dripping with religiosity and calls for patriotic unity, Mr. Biden has nonetheless acutely acknowledged the threat posed by the white supremacist’s cancer. The attempted "Klux Klan Coup" on Capitol Hill, to use the title of an Indian newspaper, may have served this purpose, as the murder of George Floyd apparently was not enough. To ensure that the political class and white public opinion finally get their heads out of the sand. To ensure that President Biden clearly embraces the "cause" of racial justice.
There will be a Senate trial to try Mr. Trump for "incitement to insurgency." Some suggest that, rather than making it a punitive expedition, given the chances that there will be insufficient Republican votes to condemn it, we make it a broad exercise of introspection in the form of a "truth and reconciliation commission". ". The proposal deserves reflection. The “cure” of Americans, which Mr. Biden calls for, could usefully go through such a process.
