Today, Explained - We scored Biden’s first year

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

We scored Biden’s first year The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos evaluates President Biden’s first year in office and whether Biden managed to lower the temperature after the January 6 insurrection. Today’s show was produced by Jillian Weinberger, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by EfimTranscript 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

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Way back in April of this year, we graded President Biden's first hundred days. Literally, he got some A's, he got some B's. We spoke to Evan Osnos from The New Yorker about how that one nickname from that one guy, Sleepy Joe, might have been sort of on point, even if Biden had been very busy pushing some

pretty progressive policies for a guy who was like a moderate stalwart in the United States Senate for decades. Now, Biden's had the big job for almost a year, so we thought we'd bring back Evan to evaluate the work. No A's, B's, or even C's, D's, or F's, but a conversation about the successes and the failures, because he's undeniably had both. We started, as President Biden did did on Inauguration Day, with unity.

We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace. Lofty stuff. How do you plan on reuniting this country, Evan? His theory was that you can use practical, functional improvements in people's lives to change the political temperature in America. Meaning that his idea is that part of the reason why we're so divided is that a big portion of the American population has decided that the government doesn't work.

It doesn't work for them. It can't work struct them. It can't work. It's structurally or culturally broken. So what he said was, rather than me try to persuade people that I'm somebody they should just inherently like or support or that my party is a place where they will find a natural home, he said, I'm just simply going to try to show that I can use the government to do things like put checks in people's hands or put shots in people's arms in the case of the vaccine or create jobs at a moment when the economy was really vulnerable. And that was really the core bet was that by going for practical improvements and fixes that he might be able to address what is fundamentally an

ideological and tribal division. Well, let's talk about how he did in his first year on that front, starting with the pandemic. How was our second pandemic president and how did he compare to our first? The Biden administration came in with a very clear sense that its absolute overwhelming priority had to be deal with the pandemic. I will spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we're sworn in on January 20th. And that was partly through mask wearing, partly through public messaging, and of course, mostly through the vaccine. And it's telling that after a couple of months in office in March when Biden had a big press conference, no questions at all about the virus and the vaccine.

The focus was on the border. It was on the filibuster. Reporters had really sort of come to assume that the COVID crisis was passing. And I think that feeling was also trickling up into the government. And that was passing. And I think that feeling was also trickling up into the government. And that was premature. I mean, for all his ambition to take the temperature down and to unite the country, it feels like even on COVID, he failed to do that.

He fell short of his vaccination goal. You've got these insane school board fights over masks and shots. His vaccine mandate is tied up in the courts. Members of his own party are joining the opposition in opposing his mandate policies. Did he fail? Well, so far, we've been talking about him. And it's a little bit like talking about a tennis match without mentioning his opponent. Obviously, a lot of the things that you just described, which are all exactly right, are a product of a sustained, intensive, in many cases, deliberate campaign on the part of conservatives and in some sense by the Republican Party

to undermine public enthusiasm for the vaccine. So maybe it doesn't work and they're simply not telling you that. The Biden administration is about to take their pressure campaign to your doorstep. Don't come knocking on my door with your fowty outy. The reality is that when people were going in to the pandemic, planners whose jobs was to think about how would the United States respond to a deadly pathogen, they thought about all kinds of things. Logistics. How do you get masks and tests and vaccines into the right places. But one of the things they really did not anticipate was that large portions of the United States would take in personal, almost ideological opposition

to the idea of taking a vaccine that had been created, tested, and approved by the government. This is about politics, and it's about social control. One of the key turning points in the vaccine narrative, the trajectory of it, was that very early on, the Biden administration was setting pretty reasonable expectations,

almost kind of expectations that were easy for them to meet, so that then when they met those thresholds, the public would feel that there was progress happening. And that began to fail over the summer because there was an effort to try to say, look, you're going to have a normal summer. We're going to get enough vaccine out there. And that didn't happen. And I think there are a lot of reasons why it has to do partly with the failure to get home testing into people's hands as quickly as they should have. There were

bureaucratic obstacles to that. But at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, there was this growing and sustained opposition among his political opponents to try to prevent the vaccine from becoming, in effect, the cultural law of the land. And that has turned out to be the single greatest impediment to getting the virus under control. Well, let's talk about an arena in which the president had more objective success, and that would be the infrastructure, infrastructure part of his infrastructure plan. This law makes us the most significant investment in roads and bridges in the past 70 years. It makes the most significant investment in passenger rail in the past 50 years and in public transit ever. How was the president able to win bipartisan support against all odds? Well, like some things in politics, it's very hard to argue with a bill that is overwhelmingly popular. And that's what was the case here, that despite the attempts by some, including former President Trump, to

present the infrastructure bill as some kind of no-go zone for Republicans, in fact, the data was pretty clear that voters are really quite eager to have things like investment in better roads, bridges, infrastructure, and all the rest, to the point that even Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, was willing to go along with a bill that he knows would ultimately deliver a political win for Joe Biden. I believe our colleagues' draft text provides a good and important jumping-off point for what needs to be a robust and bipartisan process. It is a measure of the fact that in the end, this is something that is such a sort of rudimentary

demonstration of government functioning that it was going to be harder and harder for Republicans to be standing in the way of it. Not impossible. And I think it's worth us reminding ourselves that achieving an infrastructure bill is the kind of thing that presidents have been talking about for years. As we rebuild our industries, it is also time to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. It was a running joke, obviously, in the Trump administration. They kept talking about it was infrastructure weak, and it never was. So the fact that they were able to get this thing done now in a kind of old-fashioned form of political horse trading is a sign that there is at least some pulse still circulating through the

veins of the U.S. Congress. And then there's the other sort of half of this big infrastructure vision of President Biden's, what has been called human infrastructure, also known as Build Back Better. A plan that will increase opportunities with better jobs and with higher wages. The year is almost over and it doesn't look like we'll have anything tangible before 2022. Yeah, I mean, this has been this very agonizing process dragging on for months and months. I mean, it is worth also reminding ourselves, this is actually what legislatures do. They will hash things out both between parties and also inside parties. And we're seeing this sort of play out under the Klieg lights like a surgical theater. So we're sort of seeing it all in more detail than we might have 50 years ago but

over the course of months you've watched as the number that has gone down from something like three trillion dollars and then ultimately down to something closer to 1.75 or 1.8 trillion dollars and there's two ways of looking at it one is well that's a big loss for the president because this number that was floated in the beginning is now ancient history. Or, and certainly this is how his team would want to present it, they would say, look, that's close to $2 trillion in infrastructure for human flourishing that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and we'll take it. And I think there is a genuine political debate going on about whether it was a

mistake for them to lay out these big numbers at the beginning because it raised expectations, or whether, in fact, that gave permission to moderates within the Democratic Party, ultimately who they need, to be able to say to their voters, look, we've managed to whittle the price down, and that is an achievement, and therefore we're willing to go along with this smaller number. Would a severely compromised version of Build Back Better have a worthwhile impact for Americans? Will they notice it? Will they say, oh, that's what Biden did in 10 years? Look, the reality is it is much smaller than the maximalist position that was originally laid out. But the practical fact is that what you can achieve in politics is in the realm of the

possible. And what they're able to achieve is not insignificant. If you take just one issue that happens to be something that I pay attention to, which is a proposal for an enormous national service program, civilian national service, that's called the Civilian Climate Corps. Similar to the Conservation Corps that President Roosevelt created during the Great Depression, put a new generation of Americans to work, helping us connect and conserve our public lands and become resilient in the process. If that does, in fact, get through the process, that would introduce $20 billion for young Americans to be able to go off and spend a year of service, of basically doing something larger than themselves in the spirit of the Peace Corps or of FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps.

And that's the kind of thing that we don't talk about right now very much. It doesn't get a whole lot of front page headlines. But when we go back and we look at the history of this period, in much the way that we go back and talk about the history of the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps was a really big fact of our history, and it played a meaningful role. And I think this is just one small example of how the details of this bill can be overwhelming to people, but are in fact important when it comes to understanding what it will mean for American history. Now, thinking about what's important to people, so much of what's important to people sort of felt a little bit out of President Biden's control this year. COVID variants, inflation, supply chain issues. How nimble a president did he prove to be in responding to these things that the average American really cares about? Gas prices, you know, whether they can get the thing

they ordered on Amazon in two days or whether there's enough groceries at the grocery store for their families. Well, the irony is that in some ways, for many years, Joe Biden has believed, he has said as much, that the first rule of being president is that when you're in the job, whatever agenda you have will ultimately collide immediately with reality, the things that you can't anticipate or can't fully control, and that the test of your success will be your ability to respond to that. And now, of course, he's contending with very much that principle playing out day to day. In many cases, as you go down the list, a lot of these issues are products of the failure to bring the COVID pandemic under control as readily and thoroughly

as the Biden administration wanted to do, and I think as it sort of imagined it could, because so much of the challenges of the year have been compounded or at least been aggravated by the ongoing stresses of the pandemic. And that's probably the single greatest difference between the year that he wanted to have and the year that he's been contending with. More with Evan in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We'll end America's longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed. Evan, let's talk about something Biden achieved while also grossly failing,

the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. I think that withdrawing from Afghanistan was never going to be pretty, but it did not have to be as ugly as it was. The collapse no one saw coming began on Friday, August 6th, with the fall of a provincial capital in the far west of Afghanistan. We were seeing in such vivid and really painful ways what the end of the Afghanistan war would mean for the Afghan people,

for Afghans who had helped us and were being left behind. The desperation is undeniable as Afghans fleeing the Taliban scramble to climb onto a C-17, taking off from Kabul airport. I think that was clearly nothing that the Biden administration wanted or expected. And I think there are also good reasons why they were getting out of Afghanistan and why it's been something that he wanted to do for more than a decade. And those two facts are fused because part of the reason why the withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic and in some ways hasty was because Joe Biden came into the presidency determined to get the U.S. out of that war and not to be deterred by his own advisors or by his political opponents.

I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit. And so there was a degree to which that generated a momentum. And even as the warnings became clearer that the Afghan military and civilian government were not going to be able to withstand the Taliban's advance, the plan marched forward. And in the end, the truth is Americans and the data supports this, we're really ready to get out of a war that we should have been out of years ago. But I think Americans are bruised. And I think Biden was bruised by how it happened.

And of course, as we discussed on the show a few weeks ago, Afghanistan now faces one of the most severe humanitarian crises the world has ever seen. And the United States has to face another very difficult decision, which is to provide potentially billions of dollars in aid to the Taliban or potentially turn its back on 20 million people who might starve to death this winter. Do we think Americans are going to be paying attention to how President Biden handles this crisis? Or do you think the evacuation of military forces from Afghanistan was sort of the last hurrah of Americans caring about what's going on in this country? I think there are going to be two kinds of assessments of Biden's handling of the withdrawal and what comes after. One is going to be highly politicized. We

know Republicans have said as much that they plan to make this into as much of an issue, try to tarnish his political standing, particularly in advance of the 22 midterms. To watch the president get asked the question, was there any mistakes? Would you do anything different? No. Why would you continue with this plan of failure? But there is also a legitimate, one could say, evidence-based discussion about what are America's commitments to the Afghan people and what are the ways in which, purely from a national security perspective, the United States should be involved there in order to prevent Afghanistan from becoming both a place of enormous human suffering and a threat to its neighbors and to the rest of the world. And it's going to be hard to keep those things separate. But it's actually worth pointing out that they're not the same conversation, and they're not necessarily the same critique. I think one of the hard things to talk about, because the withdrawal was so ugly, so chaotic, is that that was a reflection of the fact that the war went on, in effect, without political accountability for many,

many more years than it should have. And it's well documented. Americans were misled by political leaders about the state of the war, the prospects for victory or something like it. Today, the Taliban has been deposed. Al Qaeda is in hiding, and coalition forces continue to hunt down the remnants and holdouts. Coalition forces, including many brave Afghans, have brought America, Afghanistan, and the free world basis to contribute to the war, either in the form of taxes or in the form of conscription. It was not a war fought by all Americans. And Congress in recent years has had actually historically low levels of people who have experience either in combat themselves or have children who have served in combat. And those facts matter because it means that the war was essentially going on and on,

ticking over for years without the usual political mechanisms bringing it to an end. And when finally it did come to an end, all of that accumulated pressure and all of the ways in which Afghanistan was left unprepared to govern itself after our departure became really tragically visible. What do you think the president learned about, you know, executing an idea that he thought was really good for over a decade and seeing it shake out the way it did? The truth is, I think that President Biden does not regret leaving Afghanistan. That has been a deep, almost very personal ambition of his. And I say personal because, of course, his son Beau was in the army, and he talks about that.

I don't think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1% of this country who put that uniform on, willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation. It's worth pointing out that there has not been a president since Jimmy Carter with a child who served in combat. So it is more than abstract for him. And I think we overlook that at our sort of analytical peril because it is a big piece of his decision-making. At the same time, he's been doing politics a very long time, and he understands the really blistering damage that it did to America's image in the world and to his presidency. It would be malpractice on some level not to recognize that. But I think also the job of a president is to have to say, that happened. That's not what we wanted it to

look like. That's not what we wanted it to feel like. And now I got to figure out how to move forward. You know, all told, in his first year, I certainly heard a lot less about President Biden in my day-to-day, even working in the news, than I did about his predecessor. Was that in and of itself a success story for him, that we're just thinking about the president less and talking about the president less? I think that was part of the goal. I mean, he was essentially trying to say, as he did at his inauguration, that politics does not have to be a raging fire that consumes everything. Politics does not have to be a raging fire that consumes everything. Politics doesn't have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.

Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war. And so on some weird level, his somewhat slender presence in our public conversation for parts of his first year was a proof of concept. And the problem, of course, is also that we look to our presidents, particularly in moments of crisis, to lead us out and to make us feel like we know where we're going. And I think the reality is that the forces of disunion and division that he's dealing with and that we're all dealing with were created over the course of, if not one generation, two generations. And it has to do with our politics and our economics and the way we interact with one another online and everything else that we know. And so the fact that it took 50 or 60 years to create the mess that we're dealing with right now, the realistic answer is it's going to take more than one year and maybe even more than the next three years

to get us back to something more reassuring. And in the meantime, our democracy is not looking too hot. This is a year that began with an insurrection that had the explicit intent of blocking a free and fair election or overturning it even. You know, just a few weeks ago, President Biden had to hold a democracy summit and concede that American democracy isn't in the best shape. Here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort. Now, it's unfair to put saving it on him, but we are in a bit of a pivotal moment here. Did his first year teach us anything

about how he might try to put the train back on its tracks? Because of the state of American democratic disrepair, which is real and serious, it's tempting for us sometimes to say, well, maybe we should just not talk about democracy as much. Maybe we should stop preaching to the rest of the world about it. But actually, there is a difference between announcing that democracy is a worthy aspiration and pretending that we're somehow an icon that everybody can learn from. And I think Biden's trying to thread that needle. The key distinction between Joe Biden and his predecessor is that Biden acknowledges, yes, we are not and probably never have fully achieved our democratic ambitions to

provide rule of law and reasonable opportunity and justice to all people. There's just no question about that. But at least he is oriented in the direction of trying to achieve it. And I think the difference with his predecessor was that was a president who was actively seeking to undermine the integrity and the credibility of American democracy. He was openly mocking the fact that it was even a goal that was worth pursuing. And what Biden's trying to do is to say to the rest of the world, yes, we're not perfect, but we believe these things are worth pursuing. And I think if you give up on that, then you're really losing the democratic project. And he's not willing to give up on that. Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now.

Our show today was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It's Today Explained.