With Joe Biden out of the presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic ticket, there’s a lot of love and respect for what Joe Biden did — even though Democrats and center left media were pushing him to do it.
Putting his love of country over his love of his career will be viewed historically as either a realist political act, or an act of selflessness in a realm where politicians almost always think about what’s most important. No, I’m not talking about serving the people. I’m talking about serving the self.
Now that the media and many Democrats are in the throws of ecstasy over a candidate who can really campaign, I feel that given Biden’s legislative and policy accomplishments, Democrats ought to embrace the significant and lasting efforts he’s made investing in the United States — and how his administration was able to bring the country out of Covid without the jarring dislocations that affected other countries. I know, we don’t live in different countries. But if you hunt around, you’ll find that the United States has weathered the COVID storm better than others. We were doing pretty horribly under Trump. His major achievement was Operation Warp Speed. That was truly an example of government delivering for the people and it should serve as a model for addressing other crises that affect Americans. But that achievement was dwarfed by the sheer madness, chaos, and ineptitude of Trump’s other miscarriages of governance and his utter treasonous attempt to violently overturn the certification of Joe Biden’s election win on January 6th, 2021.
If it wasn’t for Joe Biden’s calm, persistent, and bold agenda for turning the page on the worst of COVID and using his legislative acumen (as well as a slim majority in both houses of Congress) to get incredibly ambitious (and needed) legislation through the process and onto his desk to sign in the law, we would have been in far worse shape had Trump won the election.
That’s why at a time when we’re no longer Ridin’ with Biden and are now Cruisin’ with Kamala, it’s important to acknowledge how much the Biden-Harris administration was able to accomplish. I hope as Kamala campaigns, she doesn’t run from the administration’s wins but rather holds them up as ways Democratic administrations can deliver for the people.
In an undeniale way, we are Biden Democrats now.
A Biden Democrat is the next iteration of being a New Deal Democrat. Biden and his ilk have shown themselves more than capable of being effective governors who can plant the seeds of big projects that will bloom in the next year or so. The level of badly needed infrastructure spending will be at a scale that we haven’t seen since the 1960s. I don’t think the public has any idea what’s about to happen in the next couple of years. A large part of that knowlege deficit is Biden’s fault. He didn’t take victory laps. He was too modest. He was a horrible spokesperson for his success. But those successes are incredibly significant.
The investments in green technology to measurably decrease greenhouse gasses will put us on a path that Earth remains a habitable planet for younger generations and the not-yet-born. The money sunk into manufacturing semiconductors can seem like a ho-hm affair. But without semiconductors, the devices we use now, and the devices being developed for the future simply won’t work. That’s because you cannot live the life you are currently living without them. From communications to transportation to powering our cities and towns…without these chips, we’re dead in the water. The CHIPS and Science Act invests in the development and manufacturing of semiconductors but also has money to build out state-of-the-art facilities where that can happen. In short, more infrastructure spending.
None of this would have happened without a Biden-Harris administration and a slim Democratic majority for the first two years of Biden’s term.
Kamala would do well to lean into that. Embrace it. And remind people that both she and Biden were partners in achieving these wins for all Americans. Moreover, she’s not going to let Trump do what he did in 2016: draft off the success of his predessor for a couple of years while taking a hammer to all those things government can deliver to the people they serve.
