Wait, Is Biden a Better President Than People Thought?

Many progressives have spent the Biden years in a mood of rising despair and even rage about the prospects for achieving the kind of fundamental change they believe the country and world urgently need. They wish Joe Manchin was a different kind of senator. They wish the Democrats were a different kind of party.

Above all, they wish Joe Biden was a different kind of president — or that a different leader altogether was in his job.

Suddenly, the mood is looking up. Manchin’s surprise decision to back $370 billion in tax credits to stimulate clean-energy technologies and other progressive environmental priorities came after many Democrats had concluded hope was pointless. Assuming the deal survives further legislative maneuvering in coming days — not a forgone conclusion — it invites a reappraisal of Biden’s leadership. Maybe that isn’t hopeless, either?

Following a pattern with long roots in his career, Biden is looking a little like the student who is failing his class for most of the semester, then pulls an all-nighter and slips the paper under the professor’s door at 6 a.m. It turns out the paper is actually pretty good. There’s no way he’s getting an A for the term, but no fair grader would give him an F, either. A solid B is within reach.

The pending breakthrough on climate legislation likely puts Biden’s approach to the presidency in the best possible light. Importantly, even that best light still reveals large gaps between the demands of the moment and his ability to meet those demands — or to use the tools of the modern presidency in a way that the most successful leaders have done. Biden’s presidency has more life, and more possibility, than it looked like 48 hours ago. But it is still fundamentally defined by his limits — most of all by his weak rhetorical skills and his inability to tell a compelling story about where he would take the country.

Let’s start with the positive. Viewed in simply practical terms, Biden showed that his brand of politics — which was forged in a decades-old era and was looking obsolete in this one — still has some utility. He didn’t give up when it became clear that maximalist goals were impossible, but gave Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer cover to achieve important incremental ones. He didn’t burn bridges, when many others were ready to do so.

The latest turn of events also invites looking at Biden in the context of the larger rhythms of his professional life. Being left for dead, in political terms, is hardly a new experience for him. Perhaps those rhythms give him a kind of mystical confidence that things will come through for him in the end, even when others have lost all confidence in him.

Biden, 79, has imagined himself in the presidency since at least his twenties. Repeatedly, he has had to confront the overwhelming probability that this dream wasn’t likely to ever come to life. That was true more than three decades ago — after his 1988 presidential campaign ended in embarrassment and he was later showered in criticism over his handling of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill confrontation as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — when his national reputation was shattered. That was true when he flamed out as a candidate in 2008. It was true when he yielded to Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. It was true in February 2020. I recall watching Biden campaigning in Iowa, a couple of days before he scored a fourth-place finish. He looked frail, sounded discursive and his campaign conveyed an aura of doom that was almost painful to witness. A month later, after losing the first states, he won South Carolina and soon became the presumptive nominee.

The possibility that Biden has some mystical capacity for revival can hardly offer reassurance to those Democrats — 64 percent of them, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll — who wish Biden wouldn’t run for re-election. But the probability that Biden himself believes in that capacity will likely inform his decision about what to do. Pulling a significant victory out of the hat three months before midterms quite justifiably emboldens him in ignoring doubters and critics.

But those doubters also came by their doubts for good reasons — ones that are not negated by Biden’s likely victory in the Manchin deal. It is not merely that the deal is just a fraction of the ambitious spending called for in Biden’s original “Build Back Better” legislation. The $370 billion on environmental measures still represents the U.S. government’s largest step to date in lowering carbon output. That’s historic.

Successful presidents, however, don’t just sign bills. They re-order the politics of their times. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama cited Ronald Reagan as an example of a president who “changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Would anyone say that Biden has re-ordered the politics of climate change, creating a lasting consensus? Has he changed the trajectory of America, at a moment when a recent poll by Monmouth University found 88 percent of the electorate believes the country is on the “wrong track.” Most of all, is there any precedent in Biden’s half-century on the national stage of him demonstrating that type of leadership — of transforming the way Americans view an important moment or national choice?

Joe Biden, like Joe Manchin, has shown the ability to surprise people. But it seems unlikely that he can transform himself or the limitations that have shadowed his presidency to date.