Column: President Biden's big campaign promises come with a warning label
For two weeks, former President Trump has been cooped up in a Manhattan courtroom on charges that he falsified records to conceal payments to a porn actress.
“I should be in Georgia right now. I should be in Florida right now. I should be in a lot of places campaigning right now,” Trump raged last week.
While he was stuck in court, he griped, President Biden was giving speeches in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida
“We’re locked up in a courtroom, and this guy’s out there campaigning,” Trump complained.
The former president is often accused of making things up, but this time he spoke the truth.
Biden may be 81, but at the moment, he’s campaigning with the energy of a 76-year-old.
Some presidents rely on a “Rose Garden” strategy when they run for reelection, hoping the backdrop of the White House will boost their popularity. Biden has taken the opposite tack — partly to show that he’s vigorous enough to do the job, a campaign aide said, but also to sell voters on what he wants to do in a second term.
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Last month, I wrote several columns about what Trump has promised to do if he retakes the White House — a list that includes deporting millions of immigrants without legal status, reversing efforts to slow climate change and repealing the federal health insurance program known as Obamacare.
So I figure I owe readers a column about the promises Biden is making: What does he hope to deliver if he wins a second term?
Part of the answer is unsurprising. In a second term, Biden says, he wants to “finish the job” — to implement the economic and environmental programs he got through Congress in his first term and then try to pass several more.
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Last month, he laid out an ambitious wish list in his State of the Union speech. Now he has taken that unashamedly progressive agenda on the campaign trail.
In a second term, Biden says, he would raise taxes on corporations and high income earners, meaning anyone making more than $400,000 a year. He says he would use some of the new revenue to reduce the federal deficit and the rest to fund a long list of programs, including an expanded child tax credit, a $10,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, family and medical leave and universal pre-kindergarten education.
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“Imagine a future with affordable child care, paid leave, home care, elder care and more, like every [other] major country in the world has,” he said in a speech in Scranton, Pa.
Of the nation’s billionaires, Biden said, “They don’t pay enough taxes.”
That big-government vision drew praise from progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. It may hold less appeal for fiscally conservative independents and moderate Republicans, voters Biden is trying to woo into a broad anti-Trump coalition.
Even for progressives, those proposals should come with a warning label: A second-term Biden would find it difficult to get them through Congress unless Democrats win solid majorities in both the House and Senate, an outcome that looks unlikely.
The president’s campaign pitch includes other priorities that may appeal to broader audiences.
One is abortion rights. The president has promised to seek new legislation to protect women’s rights to obtain abortions in every state.
“I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he promised in his State of the Union address.
“In our view, this is the most defining issue of the election,” a Biden campaign aide told me, speaking on condition that he not be identified by name because he was not authorized to talk on the record. The president traveled to Florida last week to denounce that state’s new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and he is likely to travel to Arizona soon to denounce the 1864 abortion law that the state’s Supreme Court recently revived.
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But codifying Roe vs. Wade in federal law is another promise that is easier said than done. To pass such a law would require at least 60 votes in the Senate or a decision to suspend the filibuster rule.
A third pillar of Biden’s campaign should be easier to deliver if he wins: his promise to protect the nation’s democratic institutions from Trump, who has said he would order the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents if he returns to the White House.
“Democracy is on the ballot,” Biden says frequently, warning that when Trump muses about ruling as a dictator, “he means it.”
Anti-Trump voters who don't love the rest of Biden's program should vote for him, the president suggests, "not because I’m running … but because of the opposite. What happens if we lose this election?”
The president’s campaign strategists say they hope those themes can persuade voters to put aside their disappointment with Biden’s economic record, especially his failure to bring high prices under control, and focus on their misgivings about Trump.
“A lot of the campaign, at this point, is making sure voters understand the choice they face — that one of two people on the ballot will actually be president next year,” the Biden aide said.
And they argue that their strategy is beginning to work, as evidenced by the fact that recent national polls have shown the race narrowing toward a virtual tie.
"The momentum is clearly in our favor," Biden said in Tampa, Fla., last week. “People are beginning to listen."
But that optimistic forecast should come with a caveat. A presidential election is won by electoral votes, not popular votes — and Biden is running behind in most of the six to eight “swing states” that will decide that contest.
Biden has offered an unabashedly progressive vision for how he would govern in a second term. But he's still a long way from winning four more years in the White House — not to mention the big congressional majorities he'd need to turn those ambitious proposals into law.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
