That’s what President Biden did when he delivered a remarkably one-sided win on the debt limit this week. And it tells you something, I think, about how he intends to run for reelection.
I know that’s not how some on the left have portrayed it, in their never-ending quest to make the almost-perfect the enemy of the perfect. But if anyone tries to tell you that Biden’s deal with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) amounted to a betrayal, like some kind of legislative Yalta, then you should make a note to listen to someone else in the future.
No, Biden did not get the “clean” debt bill he insisted on at the outset, when he said he wouldn’t negotiate with hostage-takers. But that was all posturing. Just because you walk in and tell the car dealer that you intend to pay thousands below his asking price doesn’t mean you seriously expect to end up there.
What concessions did McCarthy wrest from Biden, instead? Nondiscretionary spending — that is, the chunk of money that goes to fund most government departments — will be capped for a couple of years. Okay, but we just went through a prolonged expansion in federal spending, so any routine budget deal was probably going to level things out for a while.
Americans between the ages of 50 and 54 who are getting food assistance will soon be subject to the same work requirements as those who are 49, which is mean but not outrageous. (And because homeless recipients and veterans will now have those requirements waived, more people will likely be eligible as a result of the agreement.) Americans with student loans will have to start paying them off again, which was always going to happen, because it should.
Biden gave up some funding to modernize the Internal Revenue Service, which needed to be done, but which Democrats wanted in the first place mainly to justify projections of magical new revenue that would balance out their spending agenda. (Increased tax enforcement is the left’s version of supply-side economics.)
Probably the most odious thing Biden gave away was a natural gas pipeline through West Virginia, which the administration had killed and in which Congress had no business meddling. But because the pipeline also hands a huge victory to Joe Manchin III, who’s the only Democrat in West Virginia with a prayer of winning his Senate seat, it probably won’t keep the president up at night.
In any tense negotiation over government spending, the real goal isn’t to deflect every demand from the other side. It’s to make compromises mainly where the policies were likely going to change anyway, but where it’s advantageous if you can pin those changes on your opponents. By that standard, Biden couldn’t have done much better.
So why is the president talking as though he just played Republicans to a lengthy draw, rather than scoring an obvious checkmate? Well, for one thing, the White House badly needed the deal to pass, so it was deft to let McCarthy portray it as more of a mutual win than it actually was.
But I think it also signals that Biden knows what got him elected and that he intends to revisit the same theme in 2024. What made Biden president wasn’t a grand vision for a more activist government, though he has presided over a huge expansion in federal programs.
No, what made Biden president was the promise that he could make government work in some recognizable form again. That, after a half-century of dealmaking in Washington, Biden would be able to close the sinkhole of hatred and recrimination that the Trump era had widened. Until now, Biden’s successes in this vein — chiefly bipartisan laws on infrastructure and high-tech investment — have been pushed to the margins of news coverage.
But here, Biden managed to a score significant victory ahead of 2024: a high-stakes compromise across ideological lines, and images of the president arm in arm with a Republican speaker who seemed to loathe him just a week before.
So what if the compromise could reasonably be compared to Appomattox? Who cares whether the working relationship between the two men ends up being shallow and short-lived?
For Biden, in the run-up to another campaign, the most useful message here is that he is making Washington work like he promised — not that he’s rolling over his adversaries. Even if, at least in this case, he is.
