Isn’t screwed

Relax, Democrats, Biden’s presidency isn’t screwed

Obama and Clinton showed that the White House offers nearly endless possibilities for political revival.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

After Democrats got routed in the 2010 elections, a reporter asked President Barack Obama if the results were a sign that voters considered him “out of touch” with their concerns and whether he was willing to change his leadership style in response. Obama replied that the rebuke was something “every president needs to go through” as a reminder to stay connected with the national mood. “Now,” he added, “I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night.”

For much of the two years that followed, Obama was in approximately the position that Bill Clinton was after his own drubbing by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in the 1994 elections. At the start of 1995, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian and aging liberal warrior, responded to a White House request for advice with a tough-love message that captured how weak Clinton was perceived to be: “A prime purpose of this year’s State of the Union, I would think, would be to restore Bill Clinton’s credibility as a president and as a man.”

Biden has not seen his party blown out in the midterm elections — not yet anyway — but many of his own supporters take it as almost a given that this is coming. And, on the eve of another State of the Union, restoring his credibility as a president and a man is once again the most urgent order of business. It is an assignment that comes as his approval ratings are low, his legislative agenda is stalled and the world is facing what promises to be a costly long-term confrontation with Russia over the invasion of Ukraine.

Here is one place Biden and his anxious party might start: By remembering that the modern presidency offers its occupants nearly inexhaustible capacity for political revival. While Biden faces a growing roster of doubts and doubters — including within his own party — his two immediate Democratic predecessors offer vivid examples showing that the tools for him to reverse perceptions and regain control of his presidency are within his grasp.

Biden’s, Obama’s, and Clinton’s troubles in the opening phase of their presidencies are all different in detail. But they share a common dynamic — progressives with an ambitious agenda who faced a uniformly hostile and remorseless partisan opposition, and were widely perceived in the opening phase of their tenures as being in over their heads.

In Biden’s case, specifically, he has three principal problems.

First, he invited people to judge him principally by his success in passing major legislation. This amounted to giving himself a severe demotion, as his mixed record — big wins with infrastructure and recovery spending, a big defeat with Build Back Better — illustrated that the president has the same power of any Democratic senator in a 50-50 Senate.

Second, there are pervasive doubts about his physical and mental vigor at age 79, as Biden was older on his first day in office than any predecessor was on his last.

Third — both encompassing and superseding the first two points — is Biden’s failure as storyteller. In the modern presidency, a narrative is one of the most effective tools for a president — a way of telling the story about the president’s own progress in office, and the country’s progress under his leadership.

By outward evidence, Biden and his aides have either not settled on a narrative or have not effectively promoted it. It is on this score that the Obama and Clinton examples are especially notable. Since both Obama and Clinton recovered from midterm blowouts for Democrats to win second terms, why can’t Biden employ their strategies for recasting their presidencies before being blown out?

Obama and Clinton were different leaders facing different political circumstances, but there were at least four common lessons from their comebacks.

Let people see you grow in office

Effective presidents show strength. They don’t grovel. But when a leader goes through a drubbing, it helps to find ways to say, “I get it.”

As recounted in journalist Jonathan Alter’s book, “The Center Holds,” Obama went on what his aides called “an apology tour” to meet with interest groups and prominent supporters to show he understood their disappointment that progress had not come faster. In his acceptance speech at the 2012 convention speech, Obama said he was “proud of what we achieved together,” he had also become “far more mindful of my own failings.”

Clinton, during his 1996 State of the Union address, nodding to the more conservative mood of the country, swallowed his medicine by saying, “The era of big government is over.” (It bothered him that commentators typically forgot the next line: “But we cannot go back to the time when people were left to fend for themselves.”)

The point is not self-abasement. It is to give voters with open minds an invitation to see a president in a new light. Every good story shows the main character growing from start to finish, and discovering new dimensions of thought and values.

Clinton and Obama had an advantage Biden doesn’t — their relative youth early in office. In Biden’s case, he might turn advanced age into a narrative advantage: I’ve been around long enough to have faced plenty of setbacks, some of my own making and some just misfortune. I’ve learned you’re never defeated if you just keep trying.

Embrace divided government

No president would wish for divided government, but 15 years out of the past quarter-century four presidents have labored with a Congress fully or partially in control of the opposition party. Paradoxically, presidents often find it easier to fashion a sharper image of themselves when they are less harnessed in public opinion to their own party. It is a reminder that there is only one figure in the government who is empowered by the country as a whole.

Biden, of course, doesn’t have divided government yet. But the best way of lifting his popularity — and perhaps forestalling or mitigating a midterm backlash this fall — is to start acting like he does. This offers a chance to talk about what he personally stands for, rather than being perceived as the negotiator in chief — trying to reconcile a party that stretches from Joe Manchin to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A warning: This isn’t for the faint of heart. People tend to forget how Clinton was excoriated by his own party (a leading member of Congress complained in 1995 that Republicans were toying with him “like a kitten with a string”). Obama, meanwhile, by 2011 was trying to revive a coalition that included many activists who had long since gotten over their crushes of 2008. His support for bailing out banks (which he believed necessary to save the economy) was regarded as appeasement by the left flank of his party, and it wasn’t obvious all supporters would return home by 2012.

It is hard for president to brush off carping from their own party, but the reality is that political actors of all ideological stripes tend to be influenced above all by perceptions of power. When a president looks weak, critics feel free to bray publicly with little fear. When a president is rising in public approval, skeptics tend to fall in line.

Start campaigning now

Plenty of people don’t actually believe that Biden will, at age 81, seek reelection in 2024. Whether he does or doesn’t, however, there is plenty to learn from how Obama and Clinton won second terms despite rocky starts.

One lesson is to not get too hung up on the distinction between governing and campaigning. Obama in 2011 began weekly sessions on Saturday mornings in the State Dining Room, with about two dozen people from the White House staff and the campaign. These followed a tradition of meetings that Clinton convened in 1995 in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, in which top officials brainstormed about the intersection of government and politics.

In both cases, this melding of political and policy brains led to more robust and creative use of presidential executive orders, in ways that were directly responsive to constituencies they were trying to reach. Sometimes these can be consequential in policy terms — for instance, by expanding access to federally subsidized housing loans or putting endangered wilderness under federal protection — and sometimes they are mostly symbolic. In every case, however, they are about telling a story of what a president believes and who is he fighting for. Since these will be a primary remaining source of presidential power for Biden if Democrats lose their congressional majorities, he might has well get started now using this tool effectively.

Find the moral center

Political journalists, naturally, tend to obsess about whether presidents trying to win a second term are tacking leftward or rightward, or, in the ungainly Clinton-era phrase, “triangulating” somewhere in between. But the emphasis on ideological positioning tends to obscure the more important point — whether a president is fundamentally in tune with the mood and values of the country at a particular moment in history.

This involves a contradiction of sorts. Effective presidents must be supremely political, even as they must be perceived as — and at key moments actually be — capable of transcending narrow electoral concerns.

Clinton’s leadership in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing lifted his standing even with voters who didn’t like his politics. He ordered a military intervention to enforce a fragile peace accord in Bosnia that polls showed most voters disliked — and from that point forward polls showed much greater trust in him as commander in chief. Obama’s decision-making before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — a mission which could have ended in disaster — was a signal moment in his evolution as a leader.

In a perverse way, even Donald Trump rallied his supporters precisely because he said outrageous things that were the opposite of play-it-safe politics, and channeled the contemptuous spirit of his coalition.

Biden is not the agile political performer of either Clinton, or Obama, or Trump. But he is easily their equal and possibly their superior in terms of understanding the day-to-day practical burdens and aspirations of the voters he needs. Tuesday night’s State of the Union address will be a well-timed reminder: Biden holds an office with unmatched power to command attention and tell a story, every day, about who he is and what he is trying to achieve for the country.