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Joe Biden had counted on winning the election with a secure majority in both houses of Congress. Now there are many signs that he may be forced to cooperate with Republicans in the Senate.
During the week, his staff and political experts have frantically planned a new strategy, in which Biden will have to rely more on executive presidential orders and decrees to implement his policy.
During his first days as president, Biden promises, among other things, that the United States will re-enter the Paris Agreement on climate change. Biden’s task force on issues has produced an ambitious list of more than 200 concrete changes that can be implemented with or without Congress. It involves hundreds of climate policy reforms, most of which simply stop the deregulation that Trump has implemented with just decrees.
But Biden can also implement comprehensive student loan and medical reforms, as well as a radical and immediate change in the White House ethical guidelines.
The Biden administration is expected to have many veterans from the Obama years, but its task force has also collaborated with political experts Bernie Sanders, who have come up with proposals to, for example, strengthen workers’ rights, without the need for of a Congress.
This weekend, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris gave their first speeches to the nation after being declared the winners of the presidential election. In his Wilmington speech, Biden emphasized in particular the importance of addressing the pandemic immediately. That work begins already this week. On Monday, Biden created his own crisis group for the pandemic, which will be led by former Health Minister Vivek Murthy.
Biden has also said that he wants to continue working with White House health expert Anthony Fauci, whom Trump has said he will fire. Biden will also designate a person responsible for the nationwide production and distribution of a potential vaccine in early 2021.
The tone of Biden’s speech marked a clear shift, where it became very clear that Biden sees himself as the opposite of Trump when it comes to political leadership. He stressed that America is a country of diversity and openness, where minorities should never have to doubt that the president sees them as true Americans.
Already on his first day as president, Biden promises to launch a plan for the United States to recover from the pandemic, with a special emphasis on the “scientists and experts” who will help him design the plan. Biden extended an olive branch to Trump’s nearly 70 million voters, saying “we must not consider our opponents enemies.” That kind of diplomatic cliche is exactly what we normally expect from presidential victory numbers, but after four years with Trump, it seems like exotic rhetoric from a bygone era.
Biden and Harris’s speeches were marked by calls for courtesy and respect for dissenters, promises to “end this dark period of demonization” and heartfelt quotes from the Bible that we are in “the time of healing.”
Biden said everything Trump would never say.
Clenched his fist on the microphone podium out of sheer gratitude when he said that blacks in America helped him win the election. Biden then vowed to “eradicate systematic racism,” a phrase never before heard from a US president in a victory speech. He clearly embraced a diverse America and cited Martin Luther King and the black poet Langston Hughes. The risk is that progressive Democrats will have to settle for these rhetorical and symbolic gestures to begin with.
Biden devoted much of his speech to highlighting cooperation and compromise, highlighting the importance of politically healing America. The difficulties with that, however, became clear over the weekend, when Donald Trump, as the first president in modern times, refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory in the presidential election. So far, only two Republican senators, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, have congratulated Biden on his election victory.
Biden and Harris are only sworn in in ten weeks, but the challenges of uniting this divided country have already begun.
