How the lessons of Obama’s presidency shaped Biden’s go-big strategy

Joe Biden was working the phones, calling mayors and governors when he was vice president to find out what obstacles they were facing and dialing Cabinet secretaries to push them to distribute relief money faster.

The Obama administration had negotiated with Republicans in the Senate to pass a pared down version of its proposal to stimulate the economy following the 2008 financial crisis, but Biden was worried the money wasn’t reaching communities quickly enough.

Twelve years later, Biden faced a similar scenario at the start of his own presidency and has learned from the mistakes he saw in the Obama administration, people close to the president said.

He moved swiftly to enact a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that had bipartisan input from mayors and governors and sent checks directly to millions of Americans soon after it became law.

His Democratic Party passed the legislation with a bare majority, rejecting appeals from Republicans for a smaller package. It is preparing to use the same tactic to pass Biden’s infrastructure and families proposals if he decides against striking a deal with Republicans.

Democrats close to the White House say Biden’s experience as vice president in the early months of the Obama administration are driving a push to enact as much of his agenda as possible before next year’s midterm elections.

“I think there’s a real time clock in the administration of getting the real big things, the things that can change the balance of power in America, the push for income equality — those things, they’re trying to get done in those first two years,” said Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and close friend of the president.

Former President Barack Obama’s recovery legislation passed Congress during his first month in office. But it was not until March 2010, more than a year into Obama’s first term, that the Affordable Care Act became law. Financial regulatory and Wall Street reform legislation, known as Dodd-Frank, did not pass until later that summer.

That fall, as has become typical for the party in the White House in midterm elections, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and had their majority in the Senate shaved down, blunting their agenda.

Obama referred to Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives two years into his term as a “shellacking.” That blow was a lesson in governing that Biden and his chief of staff, Ron Klain, witnessed, and it has guided the approach of the current White House, where many of the top-level staff also worked in the Obama administration.

Democratic strategist Joel Payne said that the lessons from the Obama years have been “hard scrambled into the DNA” of the current administration. “Clearly they went to school,” he said.

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, who is in the House Democratic leadership, said that among the lessons Biden learned from the Obama era was that if the COVID-relief bill was too small, it could lead to an anemic economic recovery.

“I think Biden’s been around the Senate long enough to know that you’re never gonna get all that you request when you’re dealing with legislation. So if you’re not going to get everything you asked for, the best bet is to ask for the biggest possible thing you can ask for and get some of a big bill or get some of a little bill,” Clyburn said.

“I think that that’s what happened to Obama in all too many instances and Joe Biden has learned from all of that,” he said.

Biden’s strategy of getting COVID relief checks into Americans’ hands and vaccine shots into their arms is reflective of a key problem he ran into in the early months of his vice presidency, a former Obama White House official said. Biden immediately implemented policies as president that were popular with the public and had tangible benefits, the former official said.

“By the time we got to the midterms, nothing had been implemented, so you couldn’t really see it working, and the economy hadn’t picked up so you couldn’t really see the benefits,” the former Obama official said of the 2009 recovery law. “Whereas I think the Biden folks are gambling, if we go big, people will see the benefit, and then we might be able to avoid a midterm defeat.”

SECOND CHANCE

Rendell said the Biden administration also put greater and more strategic effort into promoting its COVID relief legislation.

“The Obama administration didn’t do a very good job explaining to the American people and beating back Republican naysaying about it,” Rendell said of the 2009 stimulus legislation.

“In the early days of the Obama administration, we used the president to go out and communicate about basically everything he did,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki recalled in an interview.

She said that as the Biden administration introduced its Cabinet and began thinking about its first 100 days, “One of the lessons learned is that we wanted to lift up and introduce the Cabinet members in a way to the American public that we just didn’t take the time to do in the early days of the Obama administration.”

Psaki was deputy press secretary and then deputy communications director to Obama in his first year in office. She now routinely brings Cabinet members to her White House press briefings.

Democrats who are close to the White House said the experience and trust among officials who worked together in similar positions during the Obama administration made for a relatively smooth transition into government despite working remotely because of the pandemic.

They credited Klain for focusing from the start on what the administration could accomplish in 100 days, compared with Obama’s hard-charging former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to win every news cycle.

The Democratic Party has shifted to the left over the last decade, which has at times pushed Biden to pursue policies that are more liberal.

Payne, who worked for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the time, said there were more moderate Democrats in office then, and progressives in the party now are demanding action from Biden. “After the Obama experience progressives are going to be a lot more wary of having a president whose record doesn’t match up to their rhetoric,” he said.

Democratic lawmakers are hoping to pass Biden’s infrastructure plan in the House before the August congressional recess. They are hopeful they will reach a compromise with Senate Republicans before the end of May on a policing bill so they can turn their attention to immigration and gun control.

PROFOUND CHALLENGES

In his inaugural address, Biden said major issues facing the country such as systemic racism and climate change would be “enough to challenge us in profound ways.”

Author and historian Ron Chernow said in an email that the nation faces “a series of slow-motion crises that have all come to a head simultaneously.”

“But the division on Capitol Hill is so deep and irrevocable that it will be a major challenge for Biden to pass large chunks of his legislative agenda, especially as he must raise taxes to do so,” Chernow said.

The last two times that there were “great bursts of Democratic activism” the party had commanding control of both houses of Congress, he said, referring to the approval of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society.

“President Biden is trying to follow in their footsteps but with the thinnest of majorities in both Houses,” Chernow said.

The Democratic Party could lose seats in the 2022 midterm elections if Biden plows ahead on his legislative agenda without Republican support, warned Rendell, who met with Biden last month in Philadelphia. But it will have been worth it if Biden is able to successfully upgrade America’s aging infrastructure and make a lasting change in the lives of ordinary Americans, he said.

“I think that would be a great legacy even if he served for four years and only had to control Congress for two. I think that would be a great legacy to have,” Rendell said.