Social policy marks the first 100 days of Biden's presidency
In early March Joe Biden met at the White House with some of the most reputable American historians, from Jon Meacham to Doris Kearns Goodwin to Walter Isaacson. The conversation revolved around the president's most admired predecessors, who dedicated himself to taking notes in a black notebook, names like Lincoln, Johnson and Roosevelt (FDR), the hero of the Democratic left who led the country out of the Great Depression to lay the foundations of the modern American social state. Historians came up with an idea, as published by "Axios": Biden thinks big and wants to do things big to transform America like FDR did in his day. And if that requires ending filibustering so that his party can legislate with a simple majority, so be it.
This week will mark the first 100 days of Biden in the White House, which have revealed a more daring leader than Barack Obama was in his day, with a remarkable discipline not to deviate from his priorities and a very accentuated social conscience. At 78, Biden was not out for campaigns, but the mantle of power carries him with solvent naturalness. In important speeches he has not failed: they have the warm Roosvelian comfort. And he is not engaging in sterile partisan skirmishes. As much as he promised in the campaign to seek consensus with the Republicans, he wastes no time begging for support and has changed the old paradigm that he conceived of the government as the problem to make it an essential part of the solution.
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In domestic politics he has gone much faster than in foreign policy. He has beaten all expectations with the vaccination campaign. More than half of the American adult population has received at least one dose of the inoculation, a milestone that has served to accelerate the recovery and position the United States as the advanced economy that will grow the most this year. Hunger is falling, two million people have caught up on their rent payments and stocks have continued to break records. The S&P index has accumulated 21 since the new president arrived in the White House, the highest number since Kennedy's first 100 days.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing is that Biden, that moderate candidate and politician akin to the economic establishment, has embraced without resistance the left turn of his party and the desires of the populist sector of Bernie Sanders to put people before big business and the economic elites. His massive stimulus package, twice the size of the one Obama approved to emerge from the 2008 crisis, includes the most ambitious measures to reduce poverty and inequality in generations. The unions once again have a seat at the table, after decades of ostracism, and the unrest about racial inequalities, climate change and economic inequality have become an essential part in the design of the Administration's policies.
Green transition
Some plans are so ambitious that not everyone considers them realistic, given the pyrrhic majority of his party in Congress. The Democrat has designed an aggressive green transition with which he aims to create millions of jobs and put the United States at the forefront of the new economy. He was featured at the Climate Leaders Summit, organized by his Administration this week to mark the American return to multilateralism, where he pledged to cut his country's polluting emissions in half over the next decade. He intends to do it with another billionaire public investment in infrastructure, which awaits approval in Congress.
Some say that it is not Biden who has changed, but the context around him. Columnist Ezra Klein wielded in 'The New York Times' that his 'radicalism' responds to the collapse of the Republican Party as a potential partner, the arrival of a new generation of young advisers in Congress, stirred by the hardships of the Great Recession, a relative disdain by the dogmas of economists and his flexibility as a politician. Biden doesn't seem to care about the qualifier. The majority of Americans (54%) approve of him, more than the percentage that Trump and Clinton had at this point, and it serves to try to convince them that it is time to think big.
Everything has gone slower in foreign policy. Biden has finished, as expected, with Trump's "America First" to embrace multilateralism again, defend global institutions and try to regain the US world leadership squandered by his predecessor. He has returned to the Paris Climate Agreement and has taken the first steps to reactivate the nuclear pact with Iran, although, in that sense, there are many fringes to be closed. His main announcement in the international arena is his promise to permanently withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, an aspiration that neither Obama nor Trump ever fulfilled.
But much of his predecessor's heritage remains. The Democrat has kept the hard line toward China and Russia, invoking cooperation with one hand and doubling down on sanctions with the other, and for now has preserved the bulk of the trade tariffs the Republican imposed on friends and foes. He is in no rush to spend political capital outside of his borders. In the Middle East, he has not revoked any of Trump's pro-Israel policies, although the State Department again speaks of "occupied territories" when referring to Gaza and the West Bank.
