The Memo: Biden steps out of Trump’s shadow

President Biden ran for election as an antidote to his predecessor. Now he faces a different test — whether he can sell his own agenda.

Biden travels to Milwaukee Tuesday, where he will hold a CNN town hall event. It is his first official trip as president.

There, Biden will make the case for the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package that is the keystone of his domestic agenda.

The CNN event is the opening night of a political performance in which the stakes could hardly be higher.

Biden is only just beginning to step out of former President Trump’s shadow after almost one month in the White House.

The reverberations of the Capitol insurrection were still being felt during Biden’s inauguration. Last week, Trump’s Senate impeachment trial sucked up all the oxygen in the political world.

The capacity of impeachment to distract from Biden’s agenda was one of the reasons Democrats opted against a drawn-out trial with witness testimony. The White House feared that taking more time would have sapped momentum for COVID-19 relief legislation and delayed Senate confirmation for Biden’s nominees.

If Biden gets the relief package through Congress — and does so without having to make compromises liable to disappoint progressives — he will build political capital for the challenges ahead.

The COVID-19 relief plan is broadly popular with the public. Sixty-eight percent of adults backed the proposal in a Quinnipiac University poll released Feb. 3.

A victory would strengthen Biden’s hand as he goes on to pursue goals that are politically trickier, such as combating climate change and enacting immigration reform.

Outright failure would be disastrous but appears unlikely given the party breakdown on Capitol Hill. The more realistic danger is the watering-down of COVID-19 relief legislation.

One flashpoint is the income thresholds at which people would no longer be eligible for direct government payments. Progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have already warned against any outcome that would mean people who received checks under Trump would not do so under Biden.

Then there is the larger issue.

The central focus of Biden’s campaign for president was not him, nor any particular policy he was proposing. It was the character of his opponent.

Biden’s call to “restore the soul of America” was understood as a promise to return to business as usual after a president whom Biden — and many of the 75 million people who voted for him — viewed as an aberration.

According to one exit poll, 37 percent of all voters in last November’s election were motivated more by dislike of their preferred candidate’s opponent than by enthusiasm for their candidate. Among that group, 70 percent voted for Biden. 

Among the 63 percent who were voting primarily out of enthusiasm for their candidate, Trump won by 20 points, 59 percent to 39 percent.

This marks Biden’s administration out as different from the one in which he served as vice president.

Former President Obama also took office after a deeply controversial predecessor, President George W. Bush. But even Obama’s critics would acknowledge that he himself generated massive excitement during his 2008 campaign.

Obama’s history-making status as he strode toward becoming the nation’s first Black president was part of that. But he also seemed to offer a fresh and expansive vision of politics itself.

Biden offers no real analogue. Attempts to boil down his appeal to a single word or two would not resemble Obama’s famous “hope and change.” It would lean heavily on more mundane terms like normalcy, competence and stability. 

All of those ideas could be reduced to the real message of his candidacy: “He’s not Trump.”

Obama’s candidacy was also animated by a handful of major policy goals: end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and expand access to health care. By the time he took office, the spiraling financial crisis had become a once-in-a-generation threat, too.

COVID-19 may be Biden’s equivalent to the financial crisis, but there was barely any broader Biden agenda clear enough to have won a mandate in November’s election.

“For many people, Biden represents a breath of fresh air and normalcy in that he’s not Trump. But almost immediately, he is going to have to showcase his own way of leading,” said one Republican strategist. “We have yet to see what that is really going to be.”

It would be foolish to underestimate Biden’s abilities. His long Senate career gives him personal relationships and an understanding of the levers of power on Capitol Hill that Obama lacked. 

His success in the 1990s in shepherding the Violence Against Women Act into law shows he knows how to win a drawn-out legislative battle.

But he is also the president of a grimly polarized nation, the target of relentless attacks in conservative-leaning media and head of a party that has the thinnest possible majority in the Senate and an only slightly bigger cushion in the House. And he is 78 years old.

This is the landscape onto which Biden is venturing as he begins to sell the COVID-19 relief package.

America will soon see if he can win backing for who he is, rather than who he isn’t.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.