Biden's Second Term Stories
The not-so-strange lack of blockbusters about what it would be like.
There are tons of pieces written about what a second Donald Trump term would be like, and hardly any about what a second Joe Biden second term would be like. Now, some of this is about Trump, for a variety of reasons. But it’s also a bit about Biden and the Democrats, and for them? The lack of stories is sort of what you would expect.
Which in fact tells us a lot about the party and this president.
What’s a second Biden term going to be like? Very much like those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, updated for changing situations and shifts within the party. Biden will, as Clinton and Obama did, look for opportunities to find common ground and cut deals with Republicans during a time of divided government — while also spending plenty of time drawing contrasts over those policy areas where Democrats back popular ideas.
Meanwhile, outside of the legislative arena he’ll continue to push party priorities on such things as health care, climate, and more through executive action, which will set up fights in the courts and with Congress, the latter depending a lot on exactly what that branch looks like after the 2024 and then 2026 elections. That “and more” won’t contain a lot of surprises; Democrats typically include a fair amount of detail in their party platform and campaign rhetoric, and those will be solid guides to where a potential second term is headed.
The key to all this is that there’s relatively little of Joe Biden in any of it. And this, too, is not new. To understand what Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson did in the White House you really do need to know a fair amount about those particular men. But for the recent Democrats (and to some extent for Republicans, but it’s more complicated and we’re focusing on Biden today), party tells us far more than the person in the Oval Office.1
Of course, that Clinton, Obama and Biden have had partisan presidencies (as Richard Skinner put it) doesn’t mean there’s nothing at all of themselves how they did their presidenting. They each had different rhetorical strengths. They had some stronger and some weaker skills, and that can explain some of their successes and failures. Biden so far seems to be, for example, stronger than either Clinton or Obama at legislating — no suprise there given his career in the Senate — while he’s quite a bit weaker at the public speaking part of the job.
But all three were pretty good at working with various party factions, and implementing, or at least attempting to implement, what the party collectively wanted.
Sometimes it didn’t look like that, as when Clinton fell on his face attempting to pass health care reform or when Biden has found it difficult to navigate the Gaza war without alienating bitterly divided party factions. But it’s no surprise that none of them received anything like a serious challenge for re-nomination.
You can see all of this, for example, in the changes in their policy positions. I suspect that of the three Biden is the least personally comfortable supporting abortion rights — but I suspect that he’ll wind up talking more about it than the other two, and with more uncompromising wording, especially compared to Clinton. Similarly, it seems highly likely that Obama was personally far more sympathetic to supporting LGBT issues, but Biden will wind up having more liberal positions during his presidency because of how the party has moved over time.2
We can see this too in Biden’s personnel choices. The hallmark of his administration has been the extreme demographic diversity of his White House and his executive branch and judicial nominations. But the huge increase in women, for example, is less about Biden’s personal preferences and more about the energy of the party from 2017 on coming particularly from women. We can note, for example, that according to reporting the advisors Biden is personally most comfortable with are three Anglo men. Even there, though, the party influence is strong; two of the three men identified as those Biden has confidence in have long histories of working for a variety of Democratic politicians. Only Ted Kaufman is really a “Biden person” in the way that Bob Haldeman was a Nixon person or Hamilton Jordan was a Carter person.3
What all of this means is that there are a lot of good stories to be told about a second Biden term — but they’re not really primarily about Biden, or even the people immediately around Biden. They’re about the various groups and interests and people within the Democratic party, and how they continue to compete and cooperate over policy positions and priorities. So any time you see a story about what gun safety activists are pushing for, or what the United Auto Workers wants from the National Labor Relations Board, or perhaps about some executive branch nominee that the Squad in the House is upset about? Those are the Biden second term stories.
Did Clinton re-make the party, though, by capturing the nomination? He certainly was aligned with one faction of the party, and had played an important role in their efforts, although even that is more complicated than I have room for here. But remember that on the one hand Clinton’s main legislative goal in 1993 was health care reform, so it’s not as if his presidency was as conservative as some think (and see here about the 1994 crime bill). And it’s not as if Clinton had to overcome a Bernie Sanders kind of opposition to be nominated; the runner-up was probably Paul Tsongas, who was more conservative than Clinton. Or Bob Kerrey, who wasn’t very liberal, either.
Yes, I know, Biden supported marriage equality as vice-president before Obama adopted that position. Surely a case of Obama feeling constrained, rather than about his true feelings.
And there were plenty more where Haldeman and Jordan came from, while most of Biden’s White House staff could easily have worked for other potential Democratic presidents had they been nominated instead of Biden.