Today, Explained - Joe Biden, r u ok?

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Build Back Blunders, and other presidential misadventures. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And I was thinking we go alphabetical. Is that OK with you? Yeah, let's do it. A is for Afghanistan. It feels like this all begins back in August of 2021 with Afghanistan. Could you just remind us, Matthew, what happened there? What happened in Afghanistan is that Joe Biden made a kind of a bold decision, right? Which is that he had promised to bring troops home from Afghanistan to end the war. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda

is degraded in Iraq, in Afghanistan. And it's time to end the forever war. That was very popular. Donald Trump promised the same thing. It's time, after all these years, to go and to bring our people back home. Barack Obama promised the same thing. By the end of 2014, the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country. But the Obama administration and the Trump administration, they both knew that if you actually brought the last troops home, some ugly stuff would unfold. And they both found ways to kind of kick the can down the road and leave this as a problem for their successor. And lots of terrible things happened in Afghanistan in the last two years of the Obama administration, in the four years of the Trump administration, but they didn't get much attention.

Biden said at the time, he said, you know, I am not going to leave this problem for my successors the way my predecessors left it for me. And that meant, though, that he took the heat. Tonight, the Taliban parading what it says is some of the billions of dollars worth of American weapons and equipment they now have in their arsenal. There was an incredible amount of attention suddenly on bad things happening. The withdrawal was very chaotic. And Afghans who helped America's military effort are stuck too. A lot of people got to say, well, I agreed with the idea of bringing the troops home, but, you know, I would have done it in some other way. And, you know, maybe there could have been a

better way to do it. But I think fundamentally, there's no great way to like admit defeat on a war. And that's why we've seen time and again, presidents try not to actually do this. Biden thought, you know, he could ride it out. His numbers at the time were pretty good. There was strong public approval for leaving Afghanistan. But when people watched it play out, he took a lot of criticism in, you know, mainstream media outlets like CNN and The New York Times that have been quite friendly to him. His refusal to acknowledge that this has not gone the way they expected is kind of

surprising to me. It really hurt his numbers, at least temporarily. Come on, man. Even though Afghanistan went so badly and approval numbers dropped, Biden did sort of manage to pivot the national conversation to this massive spending plan he had. B is for build back better. That didn't work out either. It hasn't worked out so far. I mean, we'll see what happens with it. You described it as a massive spending plan. And to me, that's the biggest problem that he's had there.

For reasons related to how the filibuster works, Democrats decided that their best chance of getting things done was to take a whole bunch of individual ideas, kind of rope them together into this one package, and try to pass it through the Senate. If they managed to get that done really, really quickly, we'd all be looking back and saying, you know, what geniuses, they're masterminds, they understood the process. But what happened instead is, you know, it's proven difficult to negotiate the terms of a multi-trillion dollar spending bill, which I think is not that unusual. But it means that we keep hearing a big debate about a massive spending bill or a debate about numbers. Are we going to spend $1.8 trillion

or are we going to spend $1.5 trillion? People don't have the perception that Joe Biden is fighting for hearing benefits for senior citizens or that Joe Biden is fighting to expand access to preschool for three and four-year-olds and nothing is happening, right? So the story every day is like people are yelling at Joe Manchin or Joe Manchin is mad at more liberal senators. And it's just a kind of a bad look. It's frustrating to progressives who want to get things done. It's frustrating to moderates who want to see people kind of getting together. And I think to normal people, it's just a little removed from what is worrying them in their daily lives, it's not really what anybody wants. Give me a break. I need time. The president's been catching a lot of heat for his handling of this Omicron variant. C is for COVID. Especially his press secretary going out there and saying,

what do you want us to do, mail every American a COVID test? And then... The federal government will purchase one half billion, that's not million, billion with a B, additional at-home rapid tests with delivery starting in January. I guess that could be seen as, you know, the White House adjusting to this pandemic, but it also is seemingly a sign the White House wasn't ready for this variant. Yeah. I mean, you know, they're in a tough position, right? I mean, they started off with a lot of momentum.

We were in a very bad shape in the winter of 2020-21. There was a really, you know, big surge in cases. But vaccinations were rolling out. And I think the idea was we were going to focus a lot of attention on the logistics of the vaccine rollout, which is something the Trump administration hadn't really done. People were going to get off these waiting lists, and then everything was going to be great. I feel confident that by summer, we're going to be well on our way to heading toward herd immunity. Once variants started arising, you know, they wound up in trouble, right? Because what Biden had said during the campaign trail is that I'm going to shut down the virus, not shut down the economy. But since it hasn't proven possible to shut down the virus, there's now this tension, right, between what do you do? A lot of people have been vaccinated and at this point are not that worried about COVID

and mostly want to see a normalization of the situation. But then a lot of people continue to be very worried about COVID and they feel that Biden promised to be the COVID hawk president. They're torn because Biden promised to beat the virus and get us back to normal. And I think it's now clear that you can't do that, right? You could do more to fight the virus in terms of imposing restrictions and rules on people's conduct, but that would make the situation less normal. Or you can encourage a return to normalcy and, you know, tell people, go out, do whatever,

you know, see Spider-Man at the movies, live your lives. But that's going to mean that the virus spreads and that particularly unvaccinated people are going to get sick and die in large numbers. America, I'm here to tell you, there's one simple thing you can do to make this whole virus go away. Stop seeing Spider-Man.

So then sometimes they come out and they say, well, you know, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Everybody should get their boosters. And to some people, that sounds very sensible. To other people, it sounds callous. To the unvaccinated themselves, they are mad that he's pushing vaccines. You know, it's challenging.

Biden made big promises as to what he was going to be able to achieve on COVID. And he's achieved, I think, you know, not as much as he said he could. President Biden kicked off the week with some pretty blunt profanity when he was asked about. I is for inflation. Is it fair to call this another Biden blunder? I mean, people are blaming him for it. I think that it is true that if he had done a smaller stimulus deal back in the early weeks of his presidency,

that there would probably be less inflation today. What's hard to know is would people actually be happier because we would have more unemployment, we would have less real output, you know, various other things like that. We know that inflation is happening globally. So it's not a strictly US phenomenon. But at the same time, inflation is higher in the United States than it is in other countries that have done less stimulus. And here's one where I really think we're going to have to see how it shakes out three, six, nine, 12 months from now, right? If inflation goes down, and particularly inflation of sort of energy and food commodities falls down, and then you have wages that are rising very rapidly, then I think all these other good things that are happening, very low unemployment rate,

rapid nominal wage growth, much faster jobs recovery than we saw in the past three recessions, people are going to say, this is amazing, You know, we're firing on all cylinders. On the other hand, if we get more bad news about commodity production, whether that's bad weather, geopolitical problems with Russia, you know, it can be a very bad look for Biden because he did pursue this very stimulative macroeconomic policy, which is not at all the only reason there's inflation, but it contributed to it. And all presidents are the owners of the economic situation that they preside over. And that's always been the case, whether it's really their fault or not. That's a great asset. More inflation.

Skipping down to V is for voting rights. Most recently, Biden went all in on a couple of voting rights bills, and that seemed to go very poorly, too. What happened there? I mean, this is the one where I am kind of baffled. The Biden administration, following cues from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he took this legislation that he knew they didn't have 50 votes in the Senate to end the filibuster and get it passed. And they seemed to think that if they just turned up the temperature on it, that there was some chance that the recalcitrant senators would buckle.

Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? It's really unusual for a party to put on the agenda an issue that is going to divide its own caucus and unite the opposition. You normally don't do that, right? There's lots of bills filed in Congress every year. There's lots of things that, like, many Democrats support, but some of them don't do that, right? There's lots of bills filed in Congress every year. There's lots of things that like many Democrats support, but some of them don't. Normally, what you expect to see is them pick up the ones that unify their caucus and talk about that, whether it's ones that pass or ones that Republicans filibuster. It's just you want to present a united front and divide your enemies. To deliberately divide yourself is very unusual. To make a case for it,

they think this legislation is incredibly important on the merits, or at least they say they do. And so even if there was only a small chance of success, they felt that they had to go for it. I would question that logic. I mean, this was one where I feel like they wanted to show they were trying, and they only embarrassed themselves. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite

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Matthew, we just ran through the ABCs of Biden's blunders. But tell me, why does it feel like he just doesn't really know what he's doing right now? I think that you oftentimes see this with presidents. When the economic fundamentals are going poorly for them, their approval ratings get low, and then they attract a lot of criticism, like, why is he making this mistake? Why is he making that mistake? And then they try to respond to critics out there. And the responses don't really work, which makes them look more kind of incompetent. And you get this downward spiral and, oh, it's an administration in crisis. I do think it's important to remember that most people

just don't pay that much attention to politics or to the news. And that what's actually playing out in reality in terms of COVID cases and economics matters so much more than these kind of day-to-day decisions about what message do you put out or what tactics do you use. But it's like, you're talking about things that are somewhat out of his control, but it feels like this mansion and cinema thing is more sort of illustrative of just this, you know, decades long experienced senator just fundamentally misunderstanding the things that he should fully understand. I mean, he spent nearly 40 years as a senator, but he's so spectacularly unsuccessful

at convincing two of his colleagues to support his legislation. How do we explain that? Biden is a very experienced U.S. senator. He knows a lot about how this stuff works. And he has shown, I think, some real aptitude in surprising people with his ability to get certain things done. One of the biggest problems that he ran into is that he was so good at convincing Sinema and Manchin and the more moderate Democratic senators to back him on the American rescue plan that I think it created unrealistic expectations. This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle class folks, people who built the country a fighting chance. When they first rolled out that $1.8 trillion proposal, I was on a briefing call with other journalists and they were explaining it and I was taking my notes. And, you know, I put in the notes that like

this seems to me like it's an opening bid. Right. Like there's no way Congress is actually going to do this. And, you know, I checked with other people I knew, outside experts, economists, and that was their consensus, right, that this was Biden kind of throwing some stuff out there to start the negotiations. But he got almost exactly what he asked for. Despite Republicans' criticism over its size, the package was hailed as a triumph for Biden and a showcase of Democratic unity when it passed the Senate. And that made people think, oh, my God, you know, maybe he's going to do it again. Maybe this extremely narrow legislative majority is going to create a blossoming of incredible progressive change. And ever since then, he's been trying to do that with Build Back Better, with voting rights, with some other things, and it hasn't been working. And we're getting the volume of legislation that I think you would expect from a 50-50 Senate, which is not that much, right? If you just kind of told somebody in 2017, imagine a world in which the Senate split 50-50, how much stuff do you think is going to pass? You'd say, yeah, probably not that much stuff. And what does happen,

you know, will probably be bipartisan. So I think that, you know, there's a slide toward that reality, but it's been a long road because Biden has been trying to get more done than the outcome really supports. Is the reason we're seeing him fail that he's trying to pressure Manchin and Sinema into, you know, doing his bidding in public? Is that the strategy that's sort of fundamentally flawed here? Because to pivot to voting rights only to have Sinema come out the next day and say she has no interest in changing the filibuster rules feels like it all just could have been avoided by picking up the phone and saying, hey, Senator Sinema, what are you going to do if I do this? Biden, and it's not just Biden personally, right? It's Chuck Schumer and it's Nancy Pelosi.

None of them have wanted to be the ones who deliver the bad news to progressives that they didn't do that well in the 2020 elections, that they ran a couple points behind Biden in Congress, and they just don't have the votes to enact this sweeping progressive agenda. So you keep seeing a kind of a game of hot potato in which each leader will say, well, it's the other one's job to come deliver now. As we all know, much more needs to be done, but we have made great progress in this year.

And the hot potato kind of got tossed to the White House to be like, why don't you turn up the temperature on this? In the last hour, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki put out that statement. I was referencing it. It's pretty long, it's pretty dense, and it's all about Joe Manchin.

Normally, the majority leader of the Senate is someone you'd expect to say, like, hey, Joe, like, let's, don't make us talk about voting rights, you know. I don't have Cinnamon Manchin. But Schumer wanted the White House to do this. The groups wanted the White House to do it. And so they did. And it, I think, makes everyone look really dumb. But it's a kind of a consensus position in progressive circles was that you got to go for it. seated in making everyone mad at Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema rather than mad at Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, which, you know, your mileage may vary in terms of how valuable that is as a long run outcome, but it's part of the game that's being played. Do you think he needs a better

Senate whisperer? Could that turn some of these recent fails around? Joe Biden has a strong personal relationship with Joe Manchin, but the staff in the White House is much more heavily populated by people from the progressive wing of the party. There's a lot of sort of Elizabeth Warren type people working at high levels of the administration. And, you know, there's a lot of smart people. She's a very popular figure among, like, young, ambitious, highly intelligent policy thinkers. But they don't necessarily have a great rapport with or understanding of the kind of most marginal members of the Senate caucus. They put a lot of stock in Biden's ability to kind of personally sell these moderate senators on things. And it worked on the American Rescue Plan. The problem is, I think, Manchin's view is that the White House kind of used their credibility on that, right?

They said, you know, trust me, we really need this. And so now he's much more skeptical. Whereas I think the White House's hope had been, well, if it works once, it'll work again. You know, you used the word normal earlier that President Biden really promised to get us back to normal. He was going to be a normal president. It felt like he did a reasonable job of that in 2021, but is off to a really rough start in 2022. Do you think he's maybe lost sight of the normalcy of that vision that he promised? I think there's been a tension in Biden's sort of political

persona where a lot of the time, you know, he's been seen as the avatar of normalcy. He was the vice president under Trump's predecessor. He was criticized a lot in the primary by more left-wing people who said, you know, all he's going to want to do is like get rid of Trump and not do bad tweets, blah, blah, blah. But Biden has also promised a lot of substantive policy changes. And you can see that he himself is torn, right, between taking incredible pride in a bipartisan infrastructure bill that kind of defied the critics and showed that he could bring Democrats and Republicans together to go past something, but wanting to say to the progressive base, like, no, the haters are wrong. I can

deliver on your agenda. And, you know, he can deliver bipartisan legislation. He has done it. He's halfway through another bipartisan bill called USICA aimed at kind of boosting American science funding. But what he can't deliver in a bipartisan way is the progressive agenda. And he has been very committed over this past fall and winter to saying, you know, he's going to do that. He's not going to give up on Build Back Better. He's not going to give up on voting rights. But just refusing to give up doesn't get that stuff done. The side of Biden who's good at doing deals is a side that recognizes you have to listen to what the members of Congress actually want to do and then just kind of get on board with that. But the side of him that wants to deliver, the side of his team that wants to deliver on this transformative change is pushing for more than that. And how does that play out in advance of the midterms? I mean, the reason that it feels

somewhat perplexing that he's taking all these L's to kick off the year is that it is, of course, an election year and his majority is literally as thin as it can be. This is a tension that is familiar from earlier presidencies. On the one hand, you know, it would probably do Democrats well to be more moderate, you know, to just like cut some really small board deals,

pass some stuff, pat everybody on the back, stop talking about transformative change, be a little bit more popular. That would reduce their loss in the midterms. At the same time, when you're sitting there and you're like, okay, we've got this majority for 10 more months and then we're gonna lose it. The pressure's on to deliver, right?

And so it pushes people in both directions. And you saw this with the Republicans and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. You saw it with Democrats and the Affordable Care Act in 2010. And the incumbent party gets kind of torn between duck and cover before the political backlash comes for us and get as much done as we can before the political backlash comes for us. People usually reconcile this by saying, well, voters will be angry if we can't show them that we've delivered on our promises. But there's really little evidence that that's true. You know, I think voters would like Biden to deliver cheaper gasoline and groceries. They would like him to deliver less spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But they are not that invested in the progressive agenda, right? I mean, there are not thousands of people rallying in the streets for Build Back Better or for the Voting Rights Act. You know, there is just not a lot of public engagement with these debates, which people have these worried that virus-related restrictions are hurting them. They're worried about their job and their cost of living and stuff like that. And the only thing that would really work is to make those things better, not to kind of pass big picture policy change.

Matthew Iglesias, he writes the Slow Boring newsletter. You can find that at slowboring.com. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. Our episode today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard, Halima Shah, Will Reed,

Hadi Mawagdi, and Victoria Chamberlain work here too. Afim Shapiro is our director of sound. Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer. Noel King Thank you. is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.