VSAs there is no Pulitzer Prize for presidential “feathers”, Joe Biden’s will have no regrets. His second full week in the White House confirmed that his new tenant’s verb generally doesn’t seek out breath, emphasis or the stratosphere, even though after Donald Trump it’s easy to appear in Demosthenes. He does not sing, he cuts straight. The president does not make speeches, he plays politics.
Faced with the Covid-19 epidemic and its procession of despair, Joe Biden has set as a course a support plan of 1,900 billion dollars (approximately 1,580 billion euros). More than double that obtained from Congress Barack Obama to overcome the subprime crisis in 2009. The current president had the choice between deploying treasures of persuasion to convince ten Republican senators to join the Democrats in order to avoid the stumbling block of the “filibuster” which allows the minority to impose its law. Or to move forward by resorting to a provision limited to budgetary affairs which makes it possible to be satisfied with a simple majority. He has already decided: the quest for consensus will wait.
The quest for consensus will wait
Would it be possible, moreover, with a Republican Party which pitifully dragged its feet before recognizing its victory? With elected officials who will undoubtedly acquit Donald Trump at the end of his impeachment trial triggered by the assault of his supporters against Congress, to which he had powerfully contributed? With leaders who refuse to sanction the conspiratorial deviations of the new generation of elected officials dubbed in his time by the former president?
When Joe Biden spoke of unity, after his swearing in, he was undoubtedly targeting less the Republican elected officials who surrounded him, and who are already burning to overthrow the very fragile Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate from 2022, than their voters, or more precisely a part of them.
Those, for example, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and who turned to Donald Trump four years later, seduced by the one who unilaterally presented himself as the spokesperson for the “forgotten”. As a study by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, has just shown, these voters, unlike traditional Republicans, are not afraid of intervention by the federal state to guarantee decent living conditions, nor by public expenditure if they can benefit from it.
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