Biden is popular, but the filibuster rule is still in place and the clock is ticking

I'm not on the team that says Biden is doing just fine as long as he is Not As Bad As Donald Trump.

That standard is not a low bar. It's a bar buried in the ground.

But I'm not ready to jump on the Biden-is-FDR bandwagon, either. Paul Krugman makes a case for being a bit more giddy about this (What’s the Secret of Biden’s Success? New York Times 04/19/2021):

Public support for the Obama stimulus [of 2009], never very strong, plunged in the face of a sluggish economic recovery. Voters might sour on Bidenomics, too, if the economy disappoints.

But all indications are that we’re heading for an economic boom, with G.D.P. growing at its fastest rate since 1984. If that happens, Biden’s policies might get even more popular than they are now.

How all of this will translate into votes remains to be seen. But early indications are that Biden has achieved what Obama never did: finding a way to make progressive policies truly popular. [my emphasis]

Krugman's point in the column is basically that Biden is doing well in the polls at the moment because he's doing substantial things that much of the public perceives as being good things. The vaccine rollout quickly picked up once Biden took office, and that was not a random coincidence. Trump's administration was an irresponsible disaster on the vaccine distribution.

Rick Perlstein has observed that Biden has an advantage that probably would have been there even if the previous administration's vaccination program had been half competent, which is that Biden gets to be the guy who made it possible for people to hug their grandchildren again. Because Biden's first year in office is coinciding with what looks like is going to be the turning point against the COVID pandemic in the US.

And as Krugman was predicting last year, once the pandemic situation improved enough to resume some like normal economic activity, the economy would see a notable upsurge just from that alone. Now we can add to that the COVID relief bill which is certainly a boost to that goal, even though economists like him were insistent on calling that a "relief" bill rather than a "stimulus."

This kind of comma-dancing is an emerging trend here in what is still Biden's first 100 days as President. For economists, the COVID bill was "relief" because it addressed immediate losses that people experienced because of the virus and the lockdowns, like providing extended unemployment coverage. Not a "stimulus" bill aimed at producing longer-term growth. But of course the financial provisions of the "relief" bill helped the economy. There was some attempt by the Republicans to label it "stimulus" which they tried to make a stigma along the lines of "welfare".

Now with the infrastructure bill, Republicans and ConservaDems are haggling over what counts as "infrastructure" with the same Republican goal, to stigmatize some parts of it as "welfare".

In any case, Krugman in this column is right, at least for the current moment. Biden is not only getting some substantial things done, but voters understand them as such. Including a notable number of Republican voters.

But the Republicans also have reason to believe that a strategy of fundamental opposition, i.e., obstruction across the board, at least on domestic issues, will be effective. Conventional political wisdom has it that the President's party is presumed to have a disadvantage in the midterm elections. And with the Senate split 50-50 and the House majority relatively slim, the Democrats not only need to get as much of their program passed as possible. They also need to make a strong positive impression on voters. And the party structures in the states tend to be stronger for Republicans. And, most ominously, is the new raft of Jim Crow over voter suppression laws like the one Georgia just passed.

Foreign policy is not on the front burner of political attention at the moment. But, of course, that can change quickly. Still, peace is popular, despite the militarized rhetoric of our political culture. Still, Biden's early announced that he's staying in the nuclear-arms agreement with Russia that Trump had decided to leave and his intention to re-enter the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran are both things that Biden could and should use to bolster his political support.

On the other hand, there are worrisome signs that Biden is still sorely tempted to revert to the Clintonian strategy of "triangulating" between (center-)left and right. Which in practice means caving to the conservatives. Not by coincidence, that is also the kind of thing that wealthy donors tend to prefer.

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss this concern in the first part of the 04/19/2021 edition of TYT, talking about some of Biden's backsliding on his own announced policies. The $15/hr. minimum wage is going nowhere. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, who often acts as a Biden surrogate, is talking about reducing the infrastructure bill (The American Jobs Plan in White House marketing) from over $2 trillion to $800 billion or so. This is the Democrats negotiating with themselves.

The filibuster rule is still in place. If it's not modified, a lot of Biden's program, including the most popular parts, have little or no hope of passing. Especially not the critical voter protection act (For the People Act) to counter Republican voter suppression. And the clock is already ticking on that. The longer the bill is delayed, the less time the Federal government will have to take the necessary legal and administrative action necessary to undo the voter suppression laws before the 2022 elections.

TYT also reports on Biden' record on immigration. Which, yes, Not As Bad As Trump. But, actually, not that good. And so far, really not much better than Trump's:

Krugman is also right in arguing that Biden coming off so far to the public as a Democrat who is actually serious about Democratic policies that visibly help people is a major contributor to his popularity to date. The fanaticism of the Republican Party has also helped. "And at this point Republicans seem so deep in the cult that they’ve forgotten how to talk to outsiders." But that was also true during Obama's first term. Yet their obstruction and their ground game in the 2010 elections was still very effective against the Democrats. The Republicans were able to take a majority in the House.