Biden's Path Isn't Obama's Path

There is something highly interesting about watching President Joe Biden laying out his agenda for the first 100 days of his administration.  He could sit back, along with the traditional Democratic Party luminaries, moving carefully into an uncertain future.  But it’s likely he learned some sound political lessons 12 years ago when he was first sworn in as vice-president of the United States.   Back then, everything was about Barack Obama, the country’s first black president and there was the sense that America had rounded a corner on its path towards social justice.

In fact, in many aspects it was the opposite that took place.  Most of us know the obvious reasons why the progressive train came off the rails.  The Great Recession threatened America’s economic future and Obama believed it best to make compromises with the financial industry and the Republican Party that eventually squandered much of the progressive agenda he had hoped to lead.  The Republicans, in what can only be deemed as subtle racism best seen in their scandalous assertions regarding Obama’s origins, did all they could to derail the policies that Obama had run on. He was never able to reclaim the mandate sufficiently to drive his ideas through Congress and his presence in the White House paved the way for the Republican revolution that resulted in Donald Trump.

Joe Biden was present with a front row seat in the Oval Office, watching as Obama’s dream was slowly whittled away by a kind of partisan politics that would prove brutal in consequence.  In fact, it was Biden’s relationships with Republican leaders that greased the wheels for such accommodations.  One gets the sense that he learned from that experience and the further unleashing of the Left/Right war in American politics that followed.

At the risk of offending some, there is a need to acknowledge that the comfortable and always compromising attitude of the liberal elites in the last decade helped to lead to this troubling moment in time.  It wasn’t all about Donald Trump or about a radical Republican party that looks nothing like its earlier persuasions.  It wasn’t just about a Great Recession and financial elites who first prompted the crisis and then escaped punishment for their ineptitude. 

All of those things were real and ruined the dreams of millions.  But instead of instigating the reforms essential to rebuilding the lives of those self-same citizens, the Democratic Party largely played it safe, subtly refusing to address the problems at the same time as they blamed the other party for their presence.  The systems of justice and economic sustenance were watered down, left without teeth by the time Donald Trump arrived and blew much of it to dust.

It’s likely that Joe Biden knows of hose years of a lack of proper guardianship and his own role in the debacle that followed.  The sense of urgency he is displaying in his rush of Executive Orders signals that his time for turning things around is limited.  He is part of a generation that initially put in place the rudimentary beginnings of social justice and economic equity and then proceeded to watch it leak away in subsequent decades – many of them under Democratic administrations.

There is some irony in this.  Back in 2008, with the financial fallout of the fiscal mismanagement, President Obama provided his rationale for why he went easy on the economic elitism so apparent in this crisis:  “It would have brought about a violence to the social order.”  Okay, fair enough.  But is that not what we have now?  And was the refusal to deal with the economic injustices then a precursor to the economic dislocation now?  Of course, it is, and Biden knows it.  It is now his time to fix those earlier errors.

The Democratic Party, like its Republican opponent, has been too close to the big money for decades and to make any progressive moves that threatens that acquired wealth will be a risky business.  But Biden seems somewhat willing to take the plunge, at least for now.  And it’s no wonder.  The closeness of both parties to the financial elites has done little to correct the environmental imbalance, improve the stock of the working women and men, and ultimately did little to prepare America for the pandemic.  

The time has come to take the necessary steps to put America back into financial equilibrium at the same time as it stirs up the social culture in order to effectively tackle systemic racism.  This will be no easy undertaking  and it’s for certain that Joe Biden will stumble along the way.  Yet this is the best chance for effective transition to a more equitable economy that America has had in years.  Obama had the opportunity but opted for economic stability.  Biden must not follow that same bath since he will only get the same result, and we know where that has left America and the world.