Today, Explained - We scored Biden's first 100 days

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Biden’s biographer, Evan Osnos, explains why the president is a weather vane for the Democratic Party. 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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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah sitting in for Sean Romsfirm today while he is getting his second shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Congratulations, Sean. Now, President Biden wants other Americans to follow suit. Go get vaccinated, America. Go and get the vaccination. They're available. Eligible now.

Biden said that when he addressed a joint session of Congress last night. It took place at a key time in American politics when a new president hits their 100th day in office and the public evaluates his performance. And Biden seems to think he's doing pretty well. Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. But we decided to make our own report card for Joe. And we're grading him on how well he kept the promises he made on... His economic policy, obviously coronavirus is a big one, immigration, climate change, and police reform and criminal justice issues. All of those are really difficult.

And it's also worth noting that the 100-day mark is kind of an arbitrary mark, and a lot of these things are going to take longer. Ellen Ilsen covers the White House for Vox. So for right now, Biden gets the score of about a B, somewhere in the B range. All right, let's go through this report card one by one. Let's start with the coronavirus response. More than 50% of Americans have received a vaccine shot at this point. A lot of us know people anecdotally who are fully vaccinated, but we are not out of the woods entirely yet. So what does that mean for Biden's

score? Yeah, I mean, like anything with COVID, right? I feel like it's tough to tell. When Biden took office, we were at one of the worst points during COVID. I mean, back in December and January, those really, really scary times. There were record numbers of cases in the U.S. And since Biden has come in office, I think that there's been this real discipline that has been a departure from the Trump administration, certainly, and a really clear laying out of here is our goal on COVID vaccinations. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's what you should expect.

And initially, they almost sort of set expectations lower or at least set them at a reasonable level, and they've been able to exceed them. So now going into summer, you know, I feel like both the number of vaccinations that have happened, but also the economy from COVID stimulus relief, those are two really big things that I think can't be underestimated. Part of his coronavirus response was a $2 trillion relief package. So has that given his grade a boost? The COVID relief package is really popular with Americans, and it's not that difficult to understand why. You know, a lot of folks got to see a direct impact from that bill

almost immediately in the form of stimulus checks hitting their bank account and other things like unemployment insurance, aid to states and cities. Back in 2008, when Obama took office. The economy was in a tailspin. And that recovery was really slow and really painful. And I think that certainly it's been well reported that the Biden administration wants to do something different. They wanted to really go big on COVID stimulus so that the economy would rebound in a huge way. And I think that there are certainly initial signs that the economy is getting ready to do that. All right. So what's the final score for Joe on the pandemic? I think that Biden gets probably, if you want to be stingy, an A minus.

But I think that on COVID and initially the economy, he gets a pretty high score in the A range. Attention, students. It's time for a school-wide conversation on race. All students are required to attend, including you, Joe Biden, even if your best friend is Barack. And is Biden keeping his promises on the other issue that's been top of mind this year, racial justice. That is definitely a lower score. I mean, this is something that, you know, as far as extending the Voting Rights Act that hasn't yet been achieved, instituting a National Police Oversight Commission that's been dropped, pushing Congress to pass the George Floyd Act, not yet achieved. And obviously, like we need to say here that Biden can't do all of these things on his own. He needs a partner in Congress. And the Congress is really closely divided between Republicans and Democrats right now.

And there might be a bipartisan path forward for a police reform bill. But I think that the country is still pretty divided on that issue. And I think that that country is still pretty divided on that issue. And I think that that divide is reflected in Congress. So then what score does Biden get for his movement on racial justice, which, as you just said, is not much movement? I think at this point, Biden probably gets an incomplete. A warning for all students and staff. Because of a series of bad decisions, the temperature of the entire building is warming rapidly and this school might become really unpleasant to go to class in. Have a nice day. And how about the environment? Is Biden's motorcade finally made up of electric vehicles? Well, it's still not quite there, but things are definitely moving. So last week was a big week for Biden's climate change policy.

The United States announced a new NDC, or nationally determined contribution. And in like everyday person speak, that's essentially what our greenhouse gas emission targets are going to be in the Paris Climate Accord. Former President Trump withdrew the country from its accord with world powers dedicated to lowering greenhouse gas emissions around the planet. But on his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order to bring the U.S. back to what he says is, quote, the number one issue facing humanity. So that was a big thing that was done. But there is a difference between saying what you're going to do and then actually doing it. And the next few months and couple years will determine whether Biden and his administration can meet the aggressive emissions standards that they've set for themselves.

And is he getting more buy-in from Congress on climate than he might be on, say, racial justice? I think he is. And that's in large part because Biden's climate bill is really wrapped up in his almost $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan. This isn't a bill yet because Congress basically is in the process of taking the plan that Biden laid out and turning it into legislative text. We think that if there's another chance for Democrats to pass something through budget reconciliation, which is what they did with his COVID bill, essentially turning this into a big budget resolution that only needs Democratic votes to pass the Senate, he could certainly pass a really

big, bold plan with no Republican votes. But it's probably going to be well into the summer before that happens. So we haven't gotten there just yet. So on climate, a centerpiece of Biden's campaign and his plan overall, what kind of grade does he get? Biden probably gets a B for that or a B minus. Attention students, attention students. We're canceling fourth period today to discuss a crisis at the border. Please report to the auditorium immediately for an assembly on what the government hasn't done about it. Let's move on to immigration. I mean, this seems like one of the thornier issues that the Biden administration has had to tackle. Yeah, it definitely is.

They had announced an immigration bill that was going to be one of their first priorities in Congress. And so far, I mean, I think that there are talks in Congress, but it hasn't really gone anywhere. And meanwhile, there is an influx of migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border, especially unaccompanied migrant children. And Biden recently faced criticism for not immediately lifting a refugee cap that had been set by Trump. It eventually happened, but there was a little bit of quibbling over that. So yeah, this is definitely one of the thorniest issues. It's one that's probably going to come up a lot in the 2022 midterms.

And it's really tricky. It's always a really tricky situation, and it's difficult to make progress on. But yeah, it's definitely one of the thorniest for Biden, I think. Like if there is any grade to get, it could be essentially an incomplete because there's a lot that is outside of Biden's control on immigration. But at the same time, immigration is, as multiple U.S. presidents have found, is a really tricky subject. But, you know, as far as positions that he took on asylums and things like that, it's definitely at least an incomplete so far. A reminder for seniors that your fifth period class will be replaced

by a presentation on how to get a job in an employment crisis. Regular guy Joe Biden, who was turned down for his dream job more than once, will be presenting. Beyond getting stimulus checks out to people, what progress has President Biden made on economic priorities for the country? I mean, his next major move on the economy is the American Jobs Plan and then the American Families Plan, which was released on Wednesday. I mean, that is collectively going to be about $4 trillion going into the economy and going into jobs in numerous sectors from clean energy jobs to construction jobs to jobs for home health aides and long-term care workers, child care workers.

So, yeah, there's a lot that's being done on the economy. His economic team is really working to try to make the economy more equal for women, for workers of color. But again, that is something that ultimately is going to be decided by Congress, depending on what bill can get through this current Congress. So while I think a lot of people like what Biden is saying and putting out there on the economy, still have to wait and see. So in terms of keeping his promise on the economy, what grade does Joe Biden get? So, I mean, I would say so far Biden probably gets somewhere around a B or a B plus because he already did deliver economic relief as far as COVID relief, things like stimulus checks, expanded UI, money to state and local. But he has this other really massive, I mean, close to $4 trillion

other part of his economic program, kind of the recovery and what comes next. And he has proposed that. There are two fully fleshed out plans that the White House has put out. But it's going to take probably months to see if they can be passed through Congress. And they might be, their final form might be a lot smaller than what the White House is proposing right now. So I'm hearing a lot of Bs, some incompletes, and one A- on this report card. Is that something the American public is happy with? So far, Biden's approval numbers are decent. They're certainly better than Trump's were, you know, at this time in his presidency, maybe a little worse than Obama's. But essentially, like people think that he is, you know, doing a fairly good job. I think, you know, it's like anything else. It's complicated. And the country, you have to remember, is really, really polarized, especially after

the 2020 election, after the Trump era. So it's a really tough political environment for really any Democrat. But so far, I think Biden is pulling off, you know, a tricky balance and doing it fairly well, at least for his first 100 days. Okay. Ellen Nielsen, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. material. Evan Osnos, you're the author of a new biography called Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. You've covered Biden for years. So what do you make of his first 100 days in office? Well, in some ways, it's, I suppose, stylistically consistent with how we have come to see him in the sense that there's not a lot of drama. I remember once somebody saying to me during the campaign, somebody who worked with him

said, I think Americans are ready for a boring president again for a while. And that wasn't a criticism. It was sort of more of a reflection of our, I would say, kind of fragile mental health collectively and politically that we just needed somebody to calm down. That's been the feel of it, even to actually, to the point that John Cornyn of Texas criticized him recently for not tweeting enough, which caught my attention. I mean, as a practical matter, Biden actually has been tweeting on average no more than six times a day. And that's, you know, noticeable because Donald Trump, after all, tweeted more than 20,000 times while in office. So I think that would be one of the ways

that we can sort of try to capture how it feels to be living in the Biden presidency after 100 days. So Sleepy Joe Biden is like a very on-brand title for him. It turns out actually to be almost part of his brand. Somebody described him recently as actively sedative, and I would argue that that's to his benefit. I mean, in a way, look, the honest answer, and I think this gets to the core of part of the reason why I got interested in him,

is that what he's trying to do is to restore where politics belongs in our lives, which is to say that we are, all of us, active participants in it. But this should not be a psychodrama about the person in the White House because that's not really what this is about. It's about all of us. And so that's the subtle, maybe not so subtle shift we're beginning to see. So the overall feel of the Biden presidency for the first 100 days is akin to a melatonin tablet. But from a political standpoint, how do the political stances that he's taken in

his first 100 days compare to the ones he took throughout the rest of his decades-long career? Those are dramatic. I mean, the differences are stark. And I think that's where you start to see that the style, the kind of muted style, is actually in some ways misleading when it comes to how dramatic some of the policy proposals have been. I mean, some of this by now we all know, but it is worth reminding ourselves of. When Joe Biden was in the Senate for 36 years, he was not known as somebody who was a progressive activist. He was by all means a centrist political figure. He was known for being one of the people who was an author of the crime bill in the 90s. In some ways, he was always at the center of the party. Somebody once said to me

that Joe Biden is almost a perfect weather vane for where the middle of the Democratic Party is. And that's the key word there is middle, because today, the middle of the party has moved. It's become, in many ways, a more ambitious party, a more activist party, certainly one that believes in the idea that government can do more to try to relieve suffering in people's lives and to try to restore fairness and opportunity into the American economy. And I think that's the—you're beginning to see him responding to that moment. I think Joe Biden is actually more of a symptom of what's happening in American politics than he is the agent who is driving it forward. Well, let's look at some of those issues one by one. I mean, Biden is inheriting an economic and employment crisis, much like he did as Obama's vice president.

So does his approach look anything like the one that the Obama administration took, or is this all new? I think they bear some of the scar tissue of what they did the last time around. There are a lot of people in this administration who served in the Obama White House with Joe Biden, with President Obama. And a lot of them feel as if they were negotiating against themselves a bit at the time, that they kind of reduced some of the scale of their ambition. I mean, just in sheer numerical terms, the stimulus that they passed this time is twice the size of the stimulus plan that they passed in 2009. And then also from a strategic perspective, you didn't see Democrats this time sitting around

waiting for Republicans to arrive on a golden chariot of bipartisanship that would reward all of their imaginings. They basically acknowledged, we're not gonna get there together. And so what we need to do is not waste critical time. And this is something of urgent priority and we're gonna drive it through.

So in a sense, it's ironic that one of the lessons that Biden took from his own experience in 2009 was to go a bit against his own instincts, which was if you get everybody into a room, you can eventually make a deal. He concluded early on in 2021, that was not in the cards this time. And I think that's actually been one of the key moments

that gets us to where we are. And then one other piece of it that's important is Biden really felt like they made a mistake in 2009 by not ringing the doorbell for Americans and telling people what they had delivered on this stimulus plan. They sort of hoped that people would appreciate that they had gotten these benefits and so on. And what they discovered in the midterm elections was that they didn't know. In fact, polling data showed that only one in 10 Americans knew they'd gotten a

tax cut when, in fact, most people had gotten some sort of benefit. So that's been a big difference, is this time they're much more adamant about making sure that people know what they passed and what the specific benefits are. So the Biden team did not wait for Republican buy-in on the American Rescue Act, for example. And we should note that that was a criticism that came up last night when Senator Tim Scott delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech. In February, Republicans told President Biden, we wanted to keep working together to finish this fight. But Democrats wanted to go it alone. They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bribed was the most liberal bill in American history.

Which begs the question, how are Democrats going to get other ambitious policies passed? I mean, Republicans are still roughly half of Congress. So the Biden administration can't rely on budget reconciliation forever, can it? No, it can't. I mean, as a functional matter, you can only use the reconciliation process, which is, of course, this fast-track procedure that allows you to avoid the possibility of a filibuster. You can only use it one more time, and that probably will be around some form of an infrastructure bill. What's exactly going to be in that infrastructure bill? That's what's

in play right now. And I think we should sort of widen the description to call it an economic bill because it could include everything from physical infrastructure to paid family leave and universal pre-K. And so at the moment, we're looking at more or less two different pieces of legislation. But there will come a point when they're going to have to begin to use regular order in order to be able to get things through. And at that point, it's going to be a lot harder not only to get Republican buy-in, but also to get buy-in across the Democratic Party, which consists of this very diverse ideological spectrum. So they will start to have to make choices, and that probably means giving some things up. But that also is, you know, that's one of the places where Joe Biden dwells. I mean, he is quite comfortable getting in a room and hashing something out for a long time. And you may start to see a little bit more of that role Biden, the negotiator, sounds a lot like Senator Biden. And I feel like what we've been seeing is President Biden, who's a who's sort of a different guy. And, you know, we know that in the Oval Office, Biden has a portrait of the man that he invoked very often on the campaign trail, FDR. So is this new President Biden, this new version of him that we're seeing, is that somebody in the mold of FDR? He takes a lot of inspiration from FDR. I will say in my own conversations with him, he is also quick to say, look, I'm no FDR. And I think there's

actually some real, you know, genuine kind of wariness of trying to overdraw the comparison. A, it feels a little unseemly to compare yourself to one of the most successful American presidents of the 20th century. On the other hand, he also does take genuine learnings from that experience. And most importantly, he says, drawing on things like how FDR talked about the need to move as a country, you know, FDR said that we Americans want action and they want action now. And there's an element of that, you hear that in some of Biden's language. The Washington Post found a great example of Biden in 1983, quoting FDR saying that it can be done, meaning rescuing ourselves from the Great Depression. And you hear very much the echoes of that language today. So there is a real sense

that he's trying to summon a bit of that old muscle memory of the possibility of collective action if we really work hard enough. So based on how he has tackled just how polarized this country is in his first hundred days, the way that he has basically gone from the gray beard who had been in politics so long that he even negotiated with segregationists to a guy who is now being called radical to somebody who AOC even says pleasantly surprised her. What are Joe Biden's next three years likely to look like? Well, I think it's worth pointing out that, and this is really actually a Joe Biden principle. He has often said that one of the first lessons

of being president is that it doesn't matter how good and how thorough your plans are, that you will have to contend with things that happen along the way that you can't anticipate. And in some ways, he once, when he was a senator, he scolded President Clinton at the time because he said, you know, you suffer from what I call Rhodes Scholar disease,

which is to say that you're so accustomed to having every fact at hand that you don't know how to function without it and that you have to go on your instincts, go on your judgment a bit. And look, taken to the extreme, that can be terrible. But what we have is actually a president over the next few years who's gonna be contending

with things that we don't know about now. And what we're beginning to see, I think beginning to recognize, or what are his instincts? What are his judgment? And his judgment at the moment is that the country is facing not just one crisis in COVID, but really a set of fundamental systemic crises that extend across racism, the arrangement of the economy, the climate,

and that he is, I'll be blunt, he doesn't want to be remembered as a president who didn't rise to the challenge. He's too old and he's wanted this for too long to allow that to be the case. He wants to be remembered as somebody who made a real imprint at a moment in which he was summoned by history to do it. Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker where he covers politics and foreign affairs.

I'm Halima Shah, filling in for Sean Romsferm. It's Today Explained.