The Daily - The Candidates: Joe Biden’s Plans

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

In the second of a two-part examination of the presidential candidates’ policies, we turn to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s agenda and how he plans to govern a nation wracked by a public health and economic crisis.The themes of Mr. Biden’s Democratic primary campaign were broad as he eschewed the policy-intensive approach of opponents like Senator Elizabeth Warren. But the onset of the pandemic helped shape and crystallize his policy plans.His approach stands in stark contrast to that of President Trump: Mr. Biden wants to actively mobilize federal resources in addressing the pandemic, an expansion to health care that he hopes will endure beyond the coronavirus.Today, we speak to Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent, about Mr. Biden’s plans for dealing with the current crisis and beyond.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political reporter at The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: We delve into the candidates’ backgrounds and present key questions about the campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.With 18 days to go, here’s a guide to the 2020 election with the latest updates, polling news and information on how to vote.

Your party wants to go socialist medicine and socialist healthcare, and they're going to dominate you, Joe, you know that. I am the Democratic Party right now. The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, approved of. What I approved of. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. We are facing too many crises. Today. We have too much work to do. In part two of our look at the policies of the presidential candidates. This is our moment to imagine and to build a new American economy.

I'm going to invest $2 trillion in infrastructure and clean energy. I'll be laser focused on working families. High speed broadband in every American household. My plan will create 18.6 million jobs in the next four years. My colleague, Alex Burns, on Joe Biden's plans for a crisis presidency. I'm running as a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president. It's Friday, October 16th. Alex, we have been talking about the campaign with you for at least a year, and I'm slightly

embarrassed by my lack of knowledge of Joe Biden's specific policy plans, which is what we want to talk with you about. You know, I think that you're not alone in I don't know about the embarrassment, but certainly the sense of not having deep familiarity with the Biden policy agenda. And I think there are good reasons for that. And I think there are good reasons for that. You know, during the Democratic primary, Joe Biden rolled out policy plans, but he was not a policy intensive, 10 point plan kind of speech maker the way, you know, an Elizabeth Warren or to some extent Pete Buttigieg was. Folks, there are three basic reasons why I'm running for president of the United States. He was running on these broad themes. The first is to restore the soul of the nation. And the second is to rebuild the backbone of this nation. And the third is to unify this nation. We always do better when we act as one America.

Right. It was about restoring a kind of pre-Trump political culture to the United States. Right. I think that, look, I believe that the president is literally an existential threat to America. He was campaigning on the idea that the biggest problem facing the country was President Trump and that the way you deal with that problem is you get rid of President Trump and you do that by nominating and electing Joe Biden. And he had other ideas, things he would do next. But the focus was beat Trump. Four years of Donald Trump will be viewed as an aberration in American history.

Eight years, eight years will fundamentally change who we are as a nation and how we're viewed around the world. But that really begins to change with the onset of the pandemic and with Biden's emergence as the presumptive Democratic nominee. And we start to hear more specifically from him about how he would approach the national emergency that we're in. This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet.

We need a plan about how we're going to aggressively manage here at home. And we start to hear in more extensive terms from him about how he would approach a number of the other most pressing issues facing the country as he sees them. We have a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial justice crisis, a climate crisis. So in a way, the pandemic gives shape and form and really crystallizes what a Joe Biden policy agenda and presidency would actually look like. That's right. He's still very focused on beating President Trump. But it's that plus a lot more because bringing the country back together and restoring normalcy in the country has a much different meaning than it did a year ago.

So how should we think about Joe Biden's post-pandemic or, I guess, pandemic-adjacent agenda? Well, I think those are good terms to sort of introduce into the way we talk about this, because I think you can break up his overarching agenda into a couple of different categories. And one of them is really pandemic specific policies, things that he is going to do or try to do because the pandemic exists that he would not have tried to do and would have had no relevance to people in the absence of the pandemic. I think there's a second group of policies that, yeah, I think you could think of them as pandemic adjacent, that they are related to what's going on, ideas related to health care and economic fairness and the structure of work and workers' rights that he and his party have been pushing for a long time, but that may have new urgency or new relevance because of the pandemic. And then I think there's a third group of policies that are not really about fixing the pandemic and don't have a natural tie into COVID,

but are big progressive goals that any Democratic president would have wanted to pursue. And the question for Biden is, can he pursue them even in the presence of COVID? Or does he have to wait until he has mastered the pandemic in order to get to this third tranche of goals? So let's start with the first bucket in the Biden policy agenda, his immediate response to the pandemic and the economic crisis that flows from it. What is the Biden pandemic plan? So this is a suite of policies that I think people have probably been hearing a lot about recently because they are so directly tied into the conversation about economic aid that has been happening in Congress. So on the one hand, you have a set of economic policies related to additional business aid.

We should be providing the money the House has passed in order to be able to go out and get people the help they need to keep their businesses open. Extended crisis unemployment programs. Nancy Pelosi and Schumer, they have a plan. He won't even meet with them. The Republicans won't meet with the Senate. Emergency aid to state and local governments. As a speaker of the House and the minority leader in the Senate have proposed a significant amount of money, about $850 billion for state and local aid. And I think it's necessary. We've got to get it out there now. These are issues that are being debated on Capitol Hill right now. And Michael, in my reporting going back to last spring, I heard from Biden advisors that he was particularly

zeroed in on this issue of state and local aid, propping up governments and making sure that you didn't end up with a situation in the winter or next spring where you would have mass layoffs of municipal employees that provide essential services. The number of firefighters you'd have to lay off, the number of teachers you'd have to lay off, the number of police officers you'd have to lay off, the number of essential workers you'd have to lay off is staggering. And this is exactly what the president and congressional Republicans have been quite resistant to, direct federal money to states and local governments. They have actually called it a blue state bailout. Right. And the view from the Biden campaign and Democrats is that, you know, this is not just a blue state problem and that a state like Texas or Tennessee is going to have,

you know, deep service cuts in the absence of some kind of federal aid as well. So he has said that he will do aid on a massive scale. The specifics of what that will look like will certainly depend on what the country looks like in January and what, if anything, Congress does between now and then under the Trump administration. So that is Biden's financial approach to the economic crisis of the pandemic. What about the medical elements of the pandemic itself? What are the policies that he plans to put in place for that? So this is, again, I think probably a pretty familiar set of ideas to most people. The seriousness of this virus also underscores that we need regular testing with results turned around rapidly and that's available to everyone.

It's testing on a massive scale. It's shipments of PPE all over the country, not just to hospitals, but to private businesses in order to make it safer for people to go back to work. Those who test positive need to participate in contact tracing. It's a national contact tracing force. That's obviously not something that we have right now. Everyone gets free access to testing and treatment. And when it's available, a vaccine, everyone gets it. And it is a commitment that the government is going to pick up the cost of COVID treatment for everybody. But within his public health plan, there are also some components that would endure beyond the pandemic. Today, I'm outlining the third plank of my Build Back Better program, mobilizing a 21st century care and elderly childhood education workforce.

So he has proposed essentially a massive federal investment in caregiving jobs and caregiving services, creating a public health jobs core with 100,000 people, a billion-dollar plan to recruit and train nurses. That is more of a program for the future that would have had relevance to the pandemic had it already existed today. So this would be the creation of an entirely new federally subsidized workforce on a pretty grand scale. Right. And the 100,000 public health jobs, the public health core that Biden has proposed is not even the full extent of the program that we're talking about. You're also talking about people who are trained to provide support to people with substance abuse problems. You're talking about more federal funding for at-home health care services and Medicaid services for the elderly and the disabled. So this is an even bigger program than just 100,000 health care workers,

which is on its own quite a substantial program. Right. And what this would seem to reflect is a very different view from Joe Biden than from President Trump about the role of government, period. I mean, especially in a crisis, but just in general, it seems like you're looking at a policy plan that envisions a much greater place for the federal government. That's absolutely right. And it is starkly different from the Trump approach, both because it is so proactive about how it envisions mobilizing the resources of the federal government to address the pandemic, but also because it envisions an expansion and an enduring expansion of the role of government in healthcare even beyond COVID. And so how should we understand this plan

politically speaking? It sounds, on paper, pretty liberal. There are clearly aspects of Biden's response plan for the pandemic that are more progressive, that they are to the left of center. The idea of expanding the government and government spending on health care services in permanent ways goes beyond just saying what is the absolute minimum that the government ought to do or the absolute minimum that the government can spend in order to blunt the worst effects of this emergency, which is, I think, a fair way to describe a mainstream conservative approach to this. We'll be right back. What about the second category of Biden policy proposals, which you, Alex, described as longstanding Democratic goals that have a kind of new urgency or rationale because of the pandemic? What would those be?

So last spring, when Biden had locked up the Democratic nomination and was starting to think about his general election strategy and platform a little bit more intensively. I spoke to a number of his policy advisors at the time about what else have you got on these core issues that the country is now confronting? Not just COVID-specific stuff, but there was this renewed national attention to the economic vulnerability of so many people in the country, this whole notion of essential workers, people who are putting their lives on the line to do jobs that do not compensate them generously. And so much of what I heard back from Biden's advisors at the time was, we've got plans

for those people, but they look a little bit more urgent now, and we might be able to make them a little bit bigger now because of the political and social momentum around addressing these problems in the context of a pandemic. So I'm thinking about proposals like infrastructure spending. We're going to invest $2 trillion in infrastructure to get to repairing our schools, our highways, our bridges, infrastructure to get to repairing our schools, our highways, our bridges, revitalizing our locks and our dams. Like child care spending. Every three and four year old child will get access to free, high quality preschool and low and middle income families won't spend more than 7 percent of their income on child care for children under the age of five. Like new workplace protections and union protections for people who work many of these lower wage jobs. Raising wages to protect workers and their overtime pay.

Ensuring access to universal health care while guaranteeing that unions and union members can keep their current insurance if they choose. And above all, more union members, more unions, more collective bargaining everywhere in America. These are policies that Joe Biden and other Democrats supported before the coronavirus. And they're policies that, for the most part, they've been supporting for years, if not decades. that, for the most part, they've been supporting for years, if not decades. And now there's a political context for those proposals that makes them maybe more sellable to voters who are not already enthusiastic about them, and that creates a mood of urgency in Washington where lawmakers who may, under different circumstances, have felt like, well, I don't really need to do a big bill about union rights,

might now feel a little bit differently about that. I'm curious how you think that would work. How, for example, stronger union protections or child care programs get tethered to the pandemic in a way that makes it possible for a Biden-Harris presidency and vice presidency to push them through. So we have seen in our polling and in polling from other media entities that the idea of ramping up federal spending on workers and on infrastructure and on child care, this is all very popular. And because these are problems that are front and center in the campaign and in all likelihood for the next administration, whoever is running it, there's a level of focus on these issues that there usually, frankly, is not.

And when you say more focus, I'm guessing, for example, there are tens of millions of Americans who suddenly are dealing with child care in a very new way because they are working from home and their kids can't go to school. That's exactly right. And any new administration faces a question of sequencing. What are you going to do and when are you going to do it? And an incoming Biden administration, I think it's pretty clear that issues like infrastructure spending, child care, union rights, health care, this is the big stuff right now. I think they're very sensitive to the reality that if Biden is not perceived as a success on getting the country healthy and working again, then very little else that he does is likely to matter for him politically. But that's going to

be the big test. I think the issue of climate change is an emblematic one for this category, maybe the most important one, where a democratic administration would always have wanted to do a big climate bill. But a big expensive infrastructure bill that includes trillions of dollars on spending on renewable energy and putting people to work in energy fields is a more direct response to the employment crisis we are facing now than it might have been in the economic conditions of a year ago. I think that the gigantic asterisk over all of this is that we don't know exactly what the balance of power is going to be in Congress. Some of the stuff that we're talking about is going to have an easier time getting passed than others.

Infrastructure is very broadly popular. There's certainly Republican votes out there for infrastructure legislation. But if the Senate's 50-50, or if it's a Republican Senate, then President Biden might well be able to get through a whole bunch of emergency economic spending and health care spending. And then when you get to the issue of union rights or of creating a public option for health insurance, then he might just hit a wall where 50 Republican senators or 48 Republican senators and a couple of Democrats say, you know what, that's a bridge too far for me. Right. And I could see the Republicans' argument very clearly in advance, and it would be a crisis. An economic crisis and a medical crisis is no time to push through your liberal vision of, you know, XYZ, labor, childcare, infrastructure. This is a time for nonpartisan problem solving. And therefore, their argument would be, we see through this, you are just shoehorning liberal policies into a crisis.

You know, I think this is another place where when you talk to people who know Joe Biden well, the experience of the Obama administration certainly informs the political thinking around this too, that, you know, he is hugely proud of the Affordable Care Act. this too, that he is hugely proud of the Affordable Care Act. I think that he and others around him are keenly aware of the political pain that ensued when the country believed that the Obama administration had moved on from dealing with the economic crisis of 2008 to deal with healthcare, which voters didn't necessarily see as directly connected to an employment and financial crisis that was happening in their own lives. I think it's pretty widely accepted in the Democratic Party that had the Obama administration put as much effort into

communicating with the country around the nature and values of their economic recovery plans as they did on health care reform, that maybe the 2010 midterm elections would not have been such a devastating defeat for the Democratic Party. And so that's going to be, I think, the sort of stress point on this second category of Joe Biden policy goals. How much of this does the public see as an important response to this crisis or as a really good idea, the virtues of which have been exposed by this crisis? And what is the point where they start to say, you know, this doesn't really seem all that relevant to what's going on in my own life right now? my own life right now. You're saying the lesson of 2008 and Obama and Biden was that they hadn't, in many voters' minds, fully confronted the fallout of the 2008 economic crisis when they moved on to something that perhaps they said was a response to that, a massive healthcare reform, but in many voters' minds was unrelated. So the lesson for them is stay focused on the pandemic.

And if you're going to do anything beyond solving for the pandemic and the economic crisis, then make sure it is clearly connected in people's minds to the pandemic. That's right. And that's, frankly, what we have seen Biden doing for most of the general election. Those who have complications from COVID-19 could become the new pre-existing conditions. That when he talks about his plans for health care. We need a public option now more than ever,

especially when more than 20 million people are unemployed. Or for childcare. You know, we're trapped in a caregiving crisis, within an economic crisis, within a healthcare crisis. Or for climate. When I think about climate change, the word I think of is jobs.

Good paying, union jobs that have put Americans to work. He is framing it as a response to the crisis, even if some of those plans predated the crisis. OK, I think that brings us to the third and final category in your telling, which is policies that are kind of on the back burner because of the pandemic that might require ending the pandemic to accomplish. Which of these stand out to you? These are cornerstone progressive policy goals where you have enormous momentum on the Democratic side for acting, but where there's not an obvious or unmissable tie-in to the pandemic and the economic recession. Take immigration reform. Take gun control. These are policies that are, of course, enormously salient to the country's experience the last four years and where

there's no question a Biden administration or any Democratic administration would take some action at the executive level to undo President Trump's approach, certainly to an issue like immigration. But are you going to get a big, complicated immigration reform bill through the House and Senate in the first couple months of your term when the country looks like it does today? Are you going to be able to dedicate the political capital you would need to pass major gun control legislation through a Senate where Democrats are not likely to have a big majority if they have a majority when you're trying to bring the country out of a recession? I don't know. That's not sort of a rhetorical question intended to

imply that, of course, that won't happen. But it's clearly going to be a heavier lift for a Democratic president next year than passing infrastructure spending and hiring tens of thousands of healthcare workers. The exception in this category might be police reform. It is an issue that has defined the general election in a way that, frankly, an issue like gun control just hasn't, and where there is some bipartisan appetite in Washington for getting something done. So it is, for me anyway, and I think for Democrats I talk to, easier to imagine legislation passing early next year that bans police chokeholds and establishes federal use of force guidelines than some of the other big ticket items that we're talking

about here. Certainly, it's very, very hard to imagine a scenario where Joe Biden walks away from police reform after the way he has talked about it in this campaign. reform after the way he has talked about it in this campaign. Alex, when you think about all these policies and just how tied they all are ultimately to the pandemic, how much do you think that all of this is the set of policies that Joe Biden wanted for his potential presidency. I mean, is this an agenda that he has been kind of forced into based on the moment? And if this were not the moment, we would be having a very, very different conversation about the kinds of policies that Joe Biden stood for. You know, in the absence of the pandemic, I think we would be talking about a lot of the

same issues, but we'd probably be talking about a different balance of issues and a different overall focus for a Biden administration. Perhaps the Joe Biden of a year and a half ago might have imagined that he would get into office and his role would be to restore dignity to the presidency, spend a lot of time overseas, rebuilding the role of the United States in the world and restoring American alliances, trying to foster a level of bipartisanship in Washington that obviously has not existed there in a long time, and then pursuing versions of a lot of the stuff that we've talked about. He was always going to try to do a climate bill if he became president. He's always promised to try to do a public health insurance option if he's elected president, an infrastructure bill. But I think the scale and intensity of the focus on the economy, the healthcare system, the environment is going to be

on a different order of magnitude because of the pandemic. And in a lot of ways, that is consistent with what we have seen throughout American history, that moments of economic emergency do lend themselves to bigger, more activist government of the kind that even a moderate Democrat like Joe Biden has pretty consistently support in his career. has pretty consistently support in his career. Well, Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

The Times reports that the number of new coronavirus infections in the U.S. is climbing toward a third peak, similar to spikes in April and July. Epidemiologists are warning of a frightening new phase of the pandemic in which cases are surging across at least 41 states. In fact, no state in the country is currently experiencing a sustained decline in infections. Public health officials are blaming the spikes on pandemic fatigue as Americans grow weary of restrictions on their lives nearly eight months into the virus. And if a vaccine were approved by between now and the end of the year, would you take it?

And if you were to become president, would you mandate that everyone has to take it? During simultaneous town halls on Thursday night, held in lieu of the second presidential debate, Joe Biden said he would take the coronavirus vaccine. Yes, I would take it. I'd encourage people to take it. But President Trump... If it went through the traditional testing process and was endorsed by scientists... On behalf of voters, who do you owe $421 million to? Okay, first of all, let me ask you, what they did is illegal, number one. Meanwhile, after repeated denials, President Trump, for the first time, seemed to confirm Times reporting that he owes more than $400 million in debt.

$400 million isn't that much. One of the biggest office buildings. But are you confirming that, yes, you do owe some $400 million? What I'm saying is that it's a tiny percentage of my net worth. And you'll see that soon because we're doing things, you know. And you'll see that soon because we're doing things, you know. We've given, I think it's 108 or 112 pages. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, and more. Thank you. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Sam Dolmec, Michaela Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Mahima Chablani, and Des Ibequa. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.