Consider This from NPR - One Year In, Tracking Biden's Progress And Shortfalls

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Today marks one year since President Joe Biden took office. His most immediate challenge was the pandemic, but he also promised action on climate, racial equity, and infrastructure. One year later, NPR correspondents Kelsey Snell and Tamara Keith take stock of Biden's accomplishments and shortfalls. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A year ago today, in his inaugural address, President Biden stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and declared that the country faced a, quote, winter of peril and possibility. Much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain. Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. Well, here we are one year later in another challenging winter with the nation still in the grips of the pandemic, a pandemic that was priority one when Biden took office. Other priorities included climate change, racial equity, the economy, health care and immigration. And this is certain. I promise you, we will be judged, you and I,

by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era. At the time, 400,000 Americans had lost their lives to COVID-19. Now, the number is more than twice that. In the last year, Biden passed a massive infrastructure bill with help from Senate Republicans. But some of those same lawmakers have blocked Biden's attempts to pass voting rights protections. And when it comes to action on climate that scientists say is so desperately needed, well, it's part of Biden's Build Back Better plan, which has been held up by members of his own party. It's been a year of challenges, but it's also been a year of enormous progress. In a speech and press conference on Wednesday, marking his first year in office, Biden acknowledged some of his

administration's efforts have fallen short and that he would make some changes going forward. I'm going to get out of this place more often. I'm going to go out and talk to the public. Which would be a deliberate change in tactic, Biden said, to remind Americans what he stands for and what he's trying to accomplish. Making the case of what we did do and what we want to do, what we need to do. Consider this. After one year, the list of things that President Biden still wants to do is long. But the list of what might be possible is shorter. We'll look at a few of Biden's biggest priorities and review his record on the pandemic. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Thursday, January 20th.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, the defining issue of President Biden's first year in office has been the pandemic, a pandemic that appeared to be fizzling last summer with widespread vaccines and less than 300 deaths a day. But now a new variant has driven case counts sky high and deaths largely among the unvaccinated are averaging 1,700 people each day. White House correspondent Tamara Keith has been following all the ups and downs of the last year. And we spoke about how Biden's White House has handled the pandemic, what they could control, and what they simply couldn't. You know, President Biden came into office during

some of the darkest days of the pandemic with a plan to ramp up vaccinations quickly. Were there early signs that this wouldn't be enough? You know, he came in with big but achievable goals, at least when it came to vaccination. Here he was about a week into the job. 100 million shots in 100 days is not the end point. It's just the start. We're not stopping there. The end goal is to beat COVID-19. And they easily met that first goal and increased it. And for the first several months when it came to COVID, things were more or less going as planned.

Biden was able to under-promise and over-deliver. They built systems for getting vaccines to people in convenient locations all over the country. Gradually, those vaccines went from scarce to widely available. And so Biden set a new goal. Our goal by July 4th is to have 70 percent of adult Americans at least one shot and 160 million Americans fully vaccinated. Yeah, but they didn't meet that goal by July 4th. Can you just remind us what was the main obstacle there? You know, in early May, when Biden set that goal, people were getting vaccinated at a steady clip, but then it just slowed down. The administration really underestimated the well of vaccine resistance. And Biden has become increasingly

frustrated with the 25% of adults who still aren't vaccinated. And he, over the summer, started calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I know this is hard to hear. I know it's frustrating. I know it's exhausting to think we're still in this fight. And I know we hope this would be a simple, straightforward line without problems or new challenges. But that isn't real life. So Biden turned to vaccine mandates, which moved the needle a little, but also caused backlash. And now the most wide reaching mandate has been blocked by the Supreme Court. But, you know, when it came to messaging around vaccinations, there was some confusion, like especially around booster shots.

Right. Yeah. This is another case where the Biden White House insisted it would follow the science. The science wasn't black and white initially. Now the message is that boosters are necessary. But getting to that point, there was a lot of back and forth. And that muddle left the country less prepared than it could have been for the Omicron variant. Yeah. And the Biden administration almost seemed caught off guard by the surge in demand for COVID testing when Omicron started taking over. Right. I mean, it hit at a terrible time, just as people were traveling to visit family for the holidays. There weren't enough COVID tests available to keep up with the record numbers of people getting sick. And President Biden admitted yesterday that this was a shortcoming. So now the federal government is preparing to ship free tests

and hand out higher quality masks all over the country. But it's looking like most of this will arrive after the worst of the Omicron variant has passed. Okay, well, we are now one year in to the Biden presidency. How has he changed the way he's talking about the pandemic at this point, given all that's happened? Yeah, he isn't talking about getting the pandemic behind us like he was a year ago. Now he is talking about living with it, as he did yesterday at his press conference. Some people may call what's happening now the new normal. I call it a job not yet finished.

It will get better. We're moving toward a time when COVID-19 won't disrupt our daily lives. Well, can we just talk about the politics for him at this moment? I mean, where does this leave President Biden, who came into office promising to manage the pandemic with utter competence? Where do things stand for him politically now? The failures and missteps, and let's just say sheer bad luck, are all a problem for him. An average of polls looking at approval of his handling of COVID just crossed into negative territory. His management of the pandemic had been one area where his approval ratings had held up,

even as other numbers fell. I spoke with Mo Alethi, a former longtime Democratic operative who now leads the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown. He says the problem now is anxiety, not so much even about getting sick as just everything else. People are anxious over rising inflation, whether or not their kids will be able to stay in school, whether or not their small businesses are going to, you know, there's gonna be another lockdown. He says President Biden has to speak to that anxiety. Pollster Christine Matthews at Bellwether Research told me part of his task now is guiding the American public to whatever the new normal looks like. People are just done with it. They're

done. And the problem is, of course, COVID's not done with us, but people are so done with it. She sees this in focus groups and the sentiment crosses all party lines. And Biden and Democrats have just a few months now before sentiments get locked in ahead of the midterm elections in November. More than anything Congress might pass, giving voters a feeling of stability, that sense that Biden projected at the beginning of his presidency that he had a plan for the pandemic and that he was going to manage it competently, that's important. But easing anxiety and projecting stability in this environment is easier said than done.

That was NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Of course, the pandemic is not the only thing on President Biden's plate. As we mentioned, large parts of his agenda have been blocked by Republicans in the Senate, including voting rights legislation and his Build Back Better plan. In Wednesday's press conference, Biden acknowledged that he's still coming to grips with how to deal with his former Senate colleagues as president. The public doesn't want me to be the president's senator. They want me to be the president and let senators be senators. And so if I've made many mistakes, I'm sure. If I've made a mistake, I'm used to negotiating to get things done. And I've been in the past relatively successful at it in the United States Senate, even as vice president.

But I think that role as president is a different role. NPR congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell followed Biden's remarks, which contains some clues as to what the second year of his legislative agenda could look like. She spoke to my co-host, Mary Louise Kelly. Let's start with the news, because the president made some, specifically on his Build Back Better, the big social spending and climate legislation package that has been stuck. Get us up to speed. Well, he admitted that the bill is stuck, as you said, and that he believes Democrats will need to break it up to pass what they can now and try to come back and do the rest later. You know, he specifically mentioned universal pre-K and climate

change as things he thinks can get done, but he does not think that the child tax credit can be part of a scaled down effort. You know, that's really significant because Democrats unified around that element. It was a huge part of how they sold the legislation to the public. It's also a provision that kept millions of kids out of poverty. Leaving that out gives Democrats a lot less to hold onto, particularly progressives who already feel the climate change provisions may not go far enough. And they worry that the pre-K program is a temporary expansion rather than a long-term program. You know, Biden talked about the limits of narrow majorities, which have been very clear throughout his presidency. But this is the first very public

signal that he is backing away from what he promised both to voters and to his party. Speaking of Democrats unifying or not unifying, Democrats in the Senate have been focused on Biden's other big call addressing voting rights, changes to the filibuster. They have not been able to meet the president's demands on either of those. What's happening inside the Democratic Party? You know, watching the press conference and the Senate floor on split screen was kind of like watching two different realities. Biden was saying he didn't overpromise, but as he spoke, Joe Manchin of West Virginia was on the Senate floor saying that another bill that Biden had personally endorsed won't be moving forward thanks to opposition within his own party. Manchin was saying he wouldn't support changing the filibuster to

get voting rights done, and that is certain to enrage already disappointed voters. You know, activists and people in the Democratic base have been calling for a confrontation about the filibuster for months. And, you know, some Democrats felt they needed to prove that Manchin can't be moved with sheer force. But none of that answers what will move them and what will help Biden get his agenda done. Meanwhile, let me try to pin something down. Republicans are blocking these voting rights bills, which target voting restrictions in Republican-led states. Does that mean, Kelsey, that Republicans are lining up uniformly opposed to doing anything in the name of protecting voting

rights? No, they are opposed to these specific bills, and some Republicans are on board with other things. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in particular gave a lengthy speech about why she's opposed to these bills but favors some action on voting rights. Here's how she framed it. Solutions to these difficult problems come best when we are able to be working together. And I know that we are very fractured in this body and it has made it hard. But hard does not mean it is impossible. She says there's bipartisan support for some things like transparency around changes to state voting rules, but she doesn't support other elements of these bills like expanded mail-in voting, for instance. That was NPR congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.