In the United States, Joe Biden ends the year on his knees

He finally admits it won’t be for this year. The Build Back Better Plan will have to wait until 2022. This is not for lack of having negotiated it downwards in the face of the demands of the two conservative Democratic senators, Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Krysten Sinema (Arizona). Originally offered at nearly 3.500 billion dollars, it was planed to the tune of 2000 billion. But for the right fringe of the party, it is still too much.

For Manchin, there is too much “social” in this plan which aims to rebuild the edifice of social and environmental protection that America needs. For Sinema, the plan is not soft enough for businesses and does not fight inflation enough. To a Democratic friend passing through Paris, I asked naively: “Since when have two elected members of your party block the interests of their political family and especially of their country by the sole fear of not being re-elected?” The familiar of the centrist camp rolled his eyes. He is at the bottom of himself intimately convinced that “my country over my party” should be the reflex of any good elected, especially when the majority is hanging by a thread in the Senate and it remains fragile in the House of made the opposite resistance from the left wing of the party, furious at having already had to give in to the whims of their more conservative colleagues. But he also thinks that the pendulum has gone too far to the left and that it is necessary to see it come back to the right. For him, if the BBB ended up being voted on at the start of the school year for an amount of 1,000 billion, it would still be a victory for the President of the United States.

Several reforms pending

In the meantime, it is still a fairly catastrophic end of the year for Joe Biden. Very low popularity polls whereas, paradoxically, the Americans approve the main lines of his plan; declining credibility as he praised his professionalism and thoroughness in turning the page on the Trump years; authority flouted by supporters of the left and right wings of his own party when he had the reputation of a “deal maker” after 40 years of parliamentary life; international prestige tarnished by the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and by the suspicions of his peers to see him locked in a very “America First” posture.

And what about the other reforms, crucial for the Democratic electorate, which have hardly advanced due to the internal battles of the party and the total opposition of the Republican party? Immigration, electoral division, right to vote, abortion, firearms: if none of them see the light of day within six months, the risk is immense to say goodbye to them if the Republicans advance in the House during the elections. mid-term elections next November. And what about the appointments of federal judges and ambassadors, blocked by Senate Committees where one or two Republican senators, like Texan Ted Cruz, paralyze the confirmation process.

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Behind the scenes of power in Washington, he said to himself that the man would nevertheless want to re-emerge in 2024. Why not?

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This Friday, December 17, just a few hours before the departure of parliamentarians on Christmas vacation, a snatched agreement allowed Joe Biden to obtain the confirmation of nine judges and about thirty ambassadors. But the Democratic Senate leaders had in return to promise to organize a vote before mid-January which could, if adopted, trigger sanctions against the authorities and companies linked to the Nordstream gas pipeline, which Biden did not want. so as not to sour his relationship with the new team in power in Berlin. As for the confirmed ambassadors, they are not those who were priority in the eyes of the White House.

Behind the scenes of power in Washington, he said to himself that the man would nevertheless want to re-emerge in 2024. Why not? Some of his predecessors, and not the least of them, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, succeeded in doing so despite the total or partial loss of Congress after only two years. It must be said that apart from inflation, which remains very problematic, the country’s economic indicators are rather positive, as Amy Porter, spokesperson for the Democrats in France, underlined during a debate organized this month. here at IFRI. Growth, unemployment, the stock market, the post-pandemic economic rebound cannot be denied, even if we must remain cautious about the impact of the end of aid, subsidies and moratoria implemented massively this year.

Isn’t it time to give Democratic voters some perspective?

But Joe Biden has just celebrated his 79th birthday. My White House-accredited CBS colleague Mark Knoller notes that the president just spent his 30th weekend of the year at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Since his inauguration in January, he has taken 89 days off. There had been a lot of talk about Donald Trump’s weekends on his golf courses, but at this time in 2017, he had only taken 75 days off. The real difference is with Barack Obama who, in the first eleven months, had only taken eight days of vacation. It is not a question here of being locked in the small calculations on the age of the captain but of taking a look at the calendar. The primaries for the midterm elections have already started and will last until the end of spring.

Isn’t it time to give Democratic voters some perspective? Vice President Kamala Harris says in the Wall Street Journal not having discussed the subject with Joe Biden. But is it the best placed to open a door to 2024? Or on the contrary, so prone to alarmed comments about its difficulty in taking charge of cases, that it would end up being an additional handicap for the duo? The simple fact that names are starting to surface to challenge her in a primary in 2024 shows how fragile the ticket has become. What names? The one who comes up most often is Pete Buttigieg, the Minister of Transport, former mayor of South Bend in Indiana, a phenomenon of the 2020 primaries and clearly centrist. But also Gavin Newsom, governor of California or African-American Stacey Abrams, in case she misses the post of governor of Georgia again.

This is where we say to ourselves that there is something despairing about the Democrats and which is not due only to the harshness of the parliamentary struggle of which the Americans are so weary, given the inability of Congress to reform the country. . Because this party, beyond its elderly hierarchs, is definitely a reservoir of talent and much more representative of American sociology than the Republican Party. But the strength of the Conservatives lies in their enthusiasm to oppose, as demonstrated by the almost intact popularity of Donald Trump. His ability to keep alive the untruth of last year’s presidential theft is one of the walls facing Joe Biden and his friends. 2022 might be a losing battle, but 2024 an even more excruciating end.

May this not prevent you from having a merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season. Merry Christmas! See you next year for season 2!

After USA 2008, Oval Office seasons 1 and 2 during the Obama presidency, then Trump Power from 2016 to 2020, this new blog by François Clemenceau aims to analyze all aspects of the Biden presidency: political, economic, diplomatic , which naturally implies the debate and the actions of the Republican opposition.

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