There's More To Life Than Obama And Biden
Should the next Democratic president be an Obama-style "neoliberal" or a Biden-style "post-neoliberal"? Probably neither. Do these categories even exist? Barely.
I’m pulling this from memory, but I was there and am certain it’s true.
Well before the 2008 election, which is to say, well before the Great Recession, Barack Obama’s dream-scenario was to win the presidency, end the war in Iraq, stitch the fraying western alliance back together, and enact a bunch of state-side reforms.
One of those reforms was what we today call the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. But in the early days of that campaign, health policy wasn’t really Obama’s thing. To the contrary, he seemed a bit annoyed that there was so much consensus within the Democratic establishment to reform the health-care system as a first order of business. Back then, several years before Bernie Sanders became an international icon, Medicare for All was a different kind of pipe dream. Every two years, House progressives would introduce and cosponsor Medicare-for-all legislation, and a variety of left-wing activists would promote it, but it wasn’t quite a litmus test for good standing in progressive America. Its most vocal proponent was Dennis Kucinich, a congressman and relic of the New Left, who lacked Sanders’s gruff charisma, and dropped out of the 2008 presidential primary without winning a single delegate.
Obama wasn’t a Kucinich- or even Sanders-style radical, but he also didn’t seem to care much for a reform model that would require taxpayers to subsidize Aetna premiums. He hoped instead to make a play for the history books by saving the world from the worst ravages of climate change. The plan was to win the presidency and then ask Congress to price carbon emissions, along the lines of legislation that his eventual opponent, John McCain, had long supported. And he’d have a crucial ally in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who also believed this was the country’s most pressing challenge.
Fate had other things in mind.
A few weeks before the election, the bottom fell out from under the economy. Most Americans blamed Republicans for the crisis, which propelled Obama to a landslide victory, and helped Democrats win supermajorities in the House and Senate. But it also scrambled Obama’s vision. Whether it matched his dream scenario or not, he would first have to administer George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout, and pass separate legislation to stimulate the economy. At some point, he’d also have to institute some regulatory reforms to make another global financial crisis less likely.
Only against that backdrop could he turn his focus to the Democratic domestic agenda, and by that point it was pretty clear his pet issue would have to wait. Millions had lost their homes, millions more were on the knife edge. Frontline members of Congress were reluctant to touch anything that might inadvertently deepen their hardship (e.g. by making energy prices higher), but they were willing to create a new benefit system to help the poor and working class. And as it happens, the activists who’d built the most sweat equity within the party wanted Democrats to put health-care reform first, too.
That’s why we got the ACA, but no cap-and-trade bill, no Employee Free Choice Act, no comprehensive immigration reform, no minimum wage increase.
Joe Biden’s path to the presidency was much different, but was subject to similar kinds of unpredictable pressures. He would make Donald Trump a one-term president, and restore honor to the office Trump had so disgraced. Then with Trump out of the picture, he’d pick up where Obama left off: Build out the ACA, invest trillions in clean energy, etc. etc. He was the moderate in that primary, which is why his agenda was so familiar and inoffensive to liberal wonks. But COVID-19 arrived and (with Trump’s help) collapsed the U.S. economy just as Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee. For purposes of unifying his party, but also to avoid repeating the mistakes he and Obama had made in 2009, Biden swung left. He wouldn’t pass a stimulus as a band-aid, and risk governing in a depressed economy; he would whip the unemployment crisis, and then “build back” in a way that would leave the country less exposed to the risks the pandemic had brought to light: weak family safety nets, dependence on foreign supply chains, etc.
But by November 2020, the economy was already healing. Soon, the main challenge would switch from reviving demand to generating enough supply to meet it. Republican voters didn’t abandon Trump en masse over his pandemic failures. And so unlike Obama, Biden came to power with a bit more than bare-majority support, and tiny margins in the House and Senate. He nevertheless did err on the side of over- rather than under-stimulating the economy, and managed to enact significant infrastructure and clean energy investments, and raise taxes on the wealthy. With no legislative room to maneuver, though, he also leaned (early, and fairly heavily) on his administrative power, particularly by seeking to revamp antitrust enforcement, domestic manufacturing, and labor unions.
It is true that Obama’s approach worked well enough for him to win a second term, whereas Biden was forced to withdraw from his own re-election campaign. But it takes a particular kind of policy myopia to explain those divergent outcomes on the basis of minor differences in policy approach and prioritization. Obama was the most charismatic politician of his generation, his challenger was a Baby Boomer and a boardroom stiff. Biden was in his 80s, and as his ability to speak clearly deteriorated, he lost the public’s confidence.
From where I sit, the upshot of this history is that Democrats were wise to nominate a charismatic outsider in 2008 and foolish to nominate an old-and-fading career politician in 2020. But as Democratic elites look ahead to the 2028 election, they have embroiled themselves in a factional dispute premised on the assumptions that a) the differences between Obamaism (or “neoliberalism”) and Bidenism (or “post-neoliberalism") are a) substantively immense and b) politically significant, and c) that a great deal thus hinges on which of these two supposed worldviews the next Democratic nominee embraces.
“For Democrats, it would be a mistake to think their loss was due solely to a global backlash against incumbents—or worse, to conclude that American voters had simply been insufficiently appreciative of everything Biden did for them,” wrote Jason Furman, who chaired Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisers. “Truly building back better will require harnessing the Biden administration’s ambitions for economic transformation without discarding conventional economic considerations of budget constraints, tradeoffs, and cost-benefit analysis—in other words, not giving in to the post-neoliberal delusion.”
Furman’s Biden-administration counterpart, Jared Bernstein responded, “to conclude… that Bidenomics was a tragedy, or that it sank Harris’ electoral chances, requires a rewriting of recent economic and political history that does a great disservice to an administration that worked as hard as we could on behalf of the American people.”
I sympathize with aspects of both of these lengthy critiques. Many other things seem clear, too, particularly in hindsight: Obama should’ve listened to those who encouraged him to propose a much bigger stimulus, Biden should’ve listened to those who encouraged him to pick a single legacy initiative, rather than seed several temporary ones. They each struck the wrong balance between substance and politics, in different directions. But my main contention is that if Democratic presidential candidates put a lot of stock in this territorial debate, when they next set out appealing to voters, we’re in for trouble.
TACK TO THE FUTURE
My point isn’t that factionalists within the party are hallucinating differences between the Obama and Biden presidencies. But they are living out the narcissism of small differences, and they show a lack of imagination about the world the next Democratic president will likely inherit.
Imagine it’s January 20, 2029. A Democrat has just been sworn in. America has somehow avoided the worst: No dictatorial coup, no mass social breakdown, no new pandemic, no major global conflict, no second insurrection. But the place is a mess. We’ve weathered years of stagflation and are poorer. Our allies have no faith in us: our political culture, our system of government, our reliability. The federal government is hollowed out and heavily corrupted. Talented, service-oriented people no longer feel drawn to government work—what’s the point if Republicans will just come back in four or eight years, wreck their projects all over again, and hound them back into unemployment?
We’re only one month in to the second Trump presidency, but I feel like this is a fairly rosy scenario.
Now ask yourself: Under circumstances like these, what should a newly elected president do? Whose past presidencies should he or she turn to for guidance? How should Democrats think about the task facing them, and to what extent should they view precision in economic policymaking as a guide star for building back?