The Biden–Harris Problem in a Nutshell

This administration has succeeded wildly — except in connecting to our everyday lives

Joe Biden has done a terrific job as president, especially in the first two years, when he had a Congress he could work with. There are, though, I think two ways in which Biden could have had an even more powerful presidency, a better legacy, and a stronger starting point for Kamala Harris’s candidacy. I’ll give two examples of each.

The first improvement has to do with messaging. There are things that Biden accomplished that are virtually unknown, or not known as the towering achievements they in fact are.

Consider this, from Heather Cox Richardson’s essential newsletter yesterday. She wrote:

In a new rule released yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription to a gym or a service as it is to sign up for one.

…

When he took office in January 2021, with democracy under siege from autocratic governments abroad and an authoritarian movement at home, President Joe Biden set out to prove that democracy could deliver for the ordinary people who had lost faith in it. The click-to-cancel rule is an illustration of an obvious and long-overdue protection, but it is only one of many ways—$35 insulin, new bridges, loan forgiveness, higher wages, good jobs—in which policies designed to benefit ordinary people have demonstrated that a democratic government can improve lives.

There’s the problem in a nutshell, or, I should say, not in a nutshell. There’s no overarching story — no nutshell this diverse collection of achievements all fit into. So when Harris and Walz and their surrogates talk about $35 insulin, it sounds like a one-off, especially when they have to add the caveat, “for seniors.” And yes, there is a genus of which these are species: “affordability” or “benefiting the middle class” or, as HCR puts it, “deliver[ing] for the ordinary people.” The problem is that these phrases are way to generic, and $35 insulin is way too specific. Somewhere in between is the sweet spot of messaging.

Exhibit A of what I mean by a nutshell story concerns energy production. The Biden doctrine all along should have been: We will increase all forms of it, not just wind and solar, but oil and gas, natural gas (including fracking), and even nuclear. (I’ve written about fracking specifically here.) And in fact, this was Joe Biden’s energy policy. He just never said it. It would have pissed off progressives, but he pissed off progressives anyway. In fact, he took all the flak that such a policy engendered, without any of the benefits, especially in energy-rich swing states as Pennsylvania. (And while it wouldn’t have carried Texas for Harris, it would have been a help to Colin Allred, who, as I write this, is on the verge of beating Ted Cruz in what will probably be the closest Senate race of 2024.)

Having an explicit policy like this right up front would have also created a context for claims that energy production is up from the Trump years, even the pre-Covid Trump years, which half the country doesn’t believe and the other half largely doesn’t know about.

Exhibit B concerns unions. The Biden administration has supported unions and aided efforts to unionize workplaces in a hundred different ways, ninety-nine of which are unknown to most voters, even most voters who are in a union.

First and foremost, he turned a corporate-lawyer-oriented National Labor Relations Board into a worker-oriented one and increased its budget. His board has, among other things, reinstated illegally fired workers, supported union elections, and required project labor agreements on construction projects.

Biden supported the UAW in their biggest fight against the carmakers in decades and settled a longshoremen strike on terms highly favorable to the union. He created a White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment (headed by Harris) that issued recommendations for ways cabinet agencies can protect and expand worker rights. A new executive order institutionalizes some of those recommendations.

The administration’s big-ticket legislative achievements (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act) include protections and, in some cases, requirements, for union labor. New “joint employer” rules prevent fast-food and other companies from evading work rules by subcontracting out jobs.

It’s hard to summarize everything Biden has done for organized labor — I probably missed at least as much as I listed — which is a pretty clear indicator that far from touting these initiatives, they’ve been almost entirely hidden from view. Every new achievement should be added to a cumulative list that workers and labor leaders can point to. Every time Republicans block a piece of pro-labor legislation (notably the Protecting the Right to Organize Act), it should go on the list as well.

Touching People’s Lives

The other weakness of the Biden administration was to not do more things that would touch the lives of every family. I’ve lost count of the number of times I heard someone say, “What’s the point of voting?” and “What have the Democrats done for me?” and “I’ve voted for 20 years and nothing changes, not in my life, anyway.” I heard it canvassing. I heard it at voter registration efforts — I especially heard it doing voter registration in the Allegheny County jail.

I have two such policies in mind. The first involves schools. When Biden was sworn in, we had already had a disastrous semester of K-12 schooling. It was hard to see a way out of that.

But if Biden had announced in January 2021 a multi-billion-dollar policy of rebuilding our schools with better heating and air conditioning, especially air filtration (and, along the way, further improve their energy efficiency with better insulation and solar panels), it would have allowed us to reopen schools sooner than we did; it would have allayed many of the legitimate fears that teachers had; and most importantly, it would have been a lasting improvement for every family and every community.  

The second takes us back to energy policy. If Biden had initiated a massive project to improve the entire energy network, from the arteries connecting one region to others, to the capillaries branching out to our homes, every family’s life would be improved in a dozen different ways.

The grid operates on three levels: the backbone, the endpoints, and everything in between. The backbone comprises three separate grids: east of the Mississippi, Texas (which has its own grid for historical reasons), and everything else west of the Mississippi. The Texas grid can’t share or swap power with the other two, and the other two can barely exchange power with one another. There are, needless to say, improvements to be made here.

Regionally and locally, we could bury our power lines so that they’re less vulnerable to hurricanes, fallen tree limbs, and everything else. We could have better metering, so that we knew which of our appliances are using a lot of power and which are not — and in coordination with a better grid, we could save money and use our existing power generation more efficiently (e.g., by making it cheaper to run the dishwasher or clothes dryer overnight).

We could bury many overhead broadband lines at the same time, giving us more reliable Internet connectivity. We could at long last blanket the country with cellular service — I can’t believe how much of the Hudson Valley still has little or no service, including my own home there.

We can increase the reliability and efficiency of our own homes. Solar panels, better insulation, and heat pumps are all easily encouraged through tax credits. Home batteries can serve as low-cost backup generators, keeping our refrigerators humming and our phones charged. Smart metering would allow us to sell energy—from solar panels or, during peak demand, from those home batteries—back to the grid.

Lowered energy bills would benefit every family. Reducing outages would be especially meaningful to the rural voters that often cost Democrats elections.

Resilience to storms and other disasters takes many forms and if you don’t do a lot of them, the weakest link will diminish the benefits of the ones you do. Pretty much every administration after Jimmy Carter’s has neglected to work on this. It’s a thoroughly bipartisan neglect. The best time to start was 50 years ago. The second-best time to start was in January 2021. 

Shoring up our schools and our energy systems are, first and foremost, things that government can and must do. They are at the heart of the very idea of government. But they can also, if accomplished through broad overarching legislation, create stories that are easily told, and benefits that touch each and every household. (Compare them to trying to talk about, say, the CHIPS Act or the IRA.) When potential voters tell me they’re not registered, or registered by not bothering to vote this year, because “nothing ever changes” and “what difference does it make,” I would love to have in my hip pocket these stories that fit in a nutshell.