Biden's brand and the cost of compromise: Debt-ceiling deal signals 2024's battle

Witness the real launch of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

With an address to the nation Friday night and the signing of the debt-ceiling deal Saturday, the president previewed the message and touted the record he will take to voters in 2024 as he seeks a second term.

It came at a moment that is displaying both his considerable strengths and his potential vulnerabilities in trying to forge the coalition and generate the enthusiasm that put him in the White House the first time. He rallied centrists with the deal, for instance, but discouraged some of the liberal and Black voters he’ll need again.

“No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed,” Biden said in his first address from the Oval Office, a sign of the speech’s gravity. “We averted an economic crisis, an economic collapse.”

The most important impact of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 is to avoid the first-ever default on the national debt, a fiscal crisis that would have dramatically increased the odds of a recession − the sort of downturn that would sap Americans’ prosperity and threaten Biden’s prospects for reelection.

He signed the bill just two days before Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had warned that the government would run out of cash to pay its bills.

There were other reasons the president’s first substantial negotiations with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., since Republicans took control of the House in January represent a key moment in Biden’s first term and in his bid for a second.

Here are three of them.

Biden’s brand: Let’s make a deal

The president’s political persona is of a centrist who can negotiate agreements with the other side, even in polarized times.

In his speech, Biden noted that he has signed other bills that passed with bipartisan support, including a huge infrastructure spending package, a measure to boost manufacturing of semiconductors and modest limits on guns.

But the debt-ceiling bill was reached with an emboldened GOP and an untested new speaker. Despite unhappiness among the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats, the bill passed Congress by sweeping majorities, 314-117 in the House and 63-36 in the Senate.

The negotiations also demonstrated McCarthy’s ability to deliver two-thirds of the Republicans despite the defections of most of the members of the combative Freedom Caucus − and to survive the experience. A procedural motion by a single unhappy Republican could have forced him to defend his position in the leadership.

That didn’t happen, not this time.

The costs of compromise

Not everybody on Biden’s team loved the terms he reached.

Forty-six House Democrats voted against the bill, most of them members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Only a single member of "the Squad," the most liberal members of the House, supported it. Four Democratic senators voted “no.”

“My red line has already been surpassed,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York complained beforehand, then voted against the bill. “I mean, where do we start? [No] clean debt ceiling. Work requirements. Cuts to programs. I would never − I would never − vote for that.”

Many of the Democratic dissenters complained that the deal imposes new work requirements on some adult recipients of food assistance, though the measure also removes current work requirements for military veterans and people who are homeless.

Even some staunch Biden allies, among them Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, protested the approval of construction of the Mountain Valley Pipelines through West Virginia and Virginia. The 300-mile, natural-gas pipeline will cut across the Appalachian Trail and, critics say, damage the environment.

The White House already has seen erosion in the president’s standing with voters in the Democratic base, among them young people and Black voters, the party’s most loyal demographic group. The Democratic coalition relies on their support and needs their enthusiasm to generate the turnout needed to win national elections.

In the 2022 elections, turnout among Black voters declined compared with the 2018 midterms; turnout fell even more among Hispanics. Biden’s approval rating among Black adults dropped to 58% in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken last month. That’s down from about 90% approval in the survey soon after his inauguration.

One more problem: The president’s misstep onstage Thursday at the Air Force Academy’s commencement proceedings was an unwelcome reminder of another challenge he faces. He tripped on the edge of a sandbag that was stabilizing a teleprompter, falling on his right side.

He was quickly helped to his feet and insisted he wasn’t hurt. “I got sandbagged,” he joked to reporters when he arrived back at the White House. But news accounts of the fall and video of it on social media plucked at voters’ concerns that Biden, now 80, is too old for another term.

What’s next?

The high stakes on the debt ceiling helped force a deal this time, but absent some national crisis, White House officials are under few illusions that more negotiations on major issues are likely to succeed as attention turns to the next election and partisanship sharpens.

In his speech, Biden depicted the GOP agenda as extreme and dangerous and described himself as a bulwark against it. He criticized Republicans for protecting what he called “special interest tax loopholes” and reiterated his support to raise taxes on the most affluent, including a minimum tax on billionaires.

Maybe not in this term, though. After that.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden's brand, McCarthy's pull and compromises' cost in debt deal