Leaders | America’s presidency

Why Joe Biden’s instinctive caution makes real change possible

How a retro can be radical

WHEN THE history of the Trump presidency is written, a photo-op in Lafayette Square at the beginning of June might just mark the turning-point. Since he announced his run for the White House in 2015, Donald Trump’s political method has been to maximise at all times the amount of attention directed at him. The Lafayette Square escapade offended Christians, because the president waved a Bible around like a prop. It embarrassed the country’s most senior military commander, who later apologised for joining a political show that involved the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters. More important, it did not work. Rather than being in command, Mr Trump seemed desperate. When power is based on appearances it can slip away suddenly.

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Before covid-19 hit America, Mr Trump looked likelier than not to be re-elected, thanks to a relentlessly growing economy. Incumbent presidents almost always win in such circumstances. Our election model made him a narrow favourite, even though he was a few points down in national polls with his rival, Joe Biden. However, the president is now in a deep hole. Mr Biden is up by nine points—more in some polls. He is doing well in battleground states like Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin, and he has strong support among older voters and is doing surprisingly well among white voters who did not go to college. Our model now gives Mr Trump only a roughly 10% chance of winning. The virus has demonstrated something definitively to a large number of persuadable voters: that Mr Trump is just not that good at being a president.

There is a long time until November. Anyone who has lived through the past decade knows that low-probability events need to be taken seriously. If the virus recedes and the economy rebounds Mr Trump’s chances may improve over the coming months. If the virus is still rampant and states have not organised themselves for voting by mail, the contest could be an unpredictable, low-turnout affair. Either way, he will try to exploit the same divisions that have worked in his favour in the past.

For all that, Mr Biden finds himself in landslide territory without having had to do very much to get there (see article). Mr Trump’s flailing has made a Democratic Senate majority possible. That opens up the chances of a highly productive presidency which once seemed inconceivable. Before covid-19 and widespread social unrest, Mr Biden’s candidacy was about restoration—the idea that he could return America and the world to the prelapsarian days of 2016. It transpires that he could have the opportunity to do something big instead.

Mr Trump is already painting this as a threat. He wants to scare voters with warnings that his opponent is a doddering fool who will be taken hostage by dangerous radicals seeking to defund the police and confiscate everybody’s guns. Some Democrats have the opposite fear, of an old patriarch stuck in his centrist ways. And indeed when Mr Biden was first elected to Washington, Elvis Presley was playing in Hawaii and Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He has survived by adjusting his views on race, sex, religion and other cultural signifiers as the Democratic Party has shifted. How, hot-headed Democrats say, can a man who has followed rather than led be trusted to fix America’s ills?

In fact, both points of view could turn out to be wrong. The dominant theory, on the right and the left, is that change in America is made by the extremes. On the right that has meant Goldwater-ism, the Tea Party and Mr Trump. On the left it has meant the anti-Vietnam movement, social-justice campaigns and Bernie Sanders. There is something to this idea: without these forces dragging him, Mr Biden might not have moved.

But to make lasting change through the federal government you need to win the Senate. And that cannot be done with a candidate at the top of the ticket who frightens the voters. That is the paradox of Mr Biden’s candidacy. Because he has flip-flopped on abortion rights and school desegregation by busing, because he comes across as the grandfather he is, he is viewed with suspicion on the left. Yet that is precisely what makes him reassuring, or at least unfrightening, to voters in states like Montana and Georgia where Democrats must win to gain a majority in the Senate. It is Mr Biden’s caution that opens up the possibility of more change than a real radical would.

That may be even more true in 2020 than in the past. Though Mr Trump’s victory in 2016 was presented, not least by him, as the triumph of the enraged and downtrodden against a broken system, it came after 20 consecutive quarters of falling unemployment, when there were few threats from terrorism at home. This time is different. With 128,000 Americans dead from covid-19 and with unemployment rife, the centrist virtues of decency, experience and a willingness to act on advice from competent people could well seem more alluring.

For a sense of what that means in practice, consider Mr Biden’s platform. His campaign website is a smorgasbord of policy plans, most of which would never happen even if he were to win. But two of them conceivably could.

The first is a public option in health care, allowing Americans to buy health insurance from the government. America has been inching its way towards universal health care, a move that Mr Trump has been unable to reverse. Under a Biden presidency it could come within touching distance. The second policy is a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr Biden wants to pass legislation to bind America to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Add to this Mr Biden’s return to multilateral engagement in foreign policy—which America’s allies would wholeheartedly endorse, and which could begin to steady a chaotic world. Even if Mr Biden accomplished only part of this agenda, the criticisms from the Democratic left would seem churlish.

Some consequential presidents have been accidental radicals. Think of Lyndon Johnson, who took office after JFK’s assassination and passed the Civil Rights Act, or George W. Bush, transformed by 9/11 from a compassionate conservative into a neocon who started two of his country’s longest wars. To have a hope of a transformative presidency, Mr Biden must not misread the paradox on which his future depends. It is by cleaving to the centre that he can best lead America in a new direction.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Retro or radical?"

Retro or radical?

From the July 2nd 2020 edition

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