Has Biden Learned From a Big Obama #Fail?

By David Corn  August 19, 2022

President Joe Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, in the White House on August 16, 2022. AP/Ken Cedeno

It’s a widely accepted truth that Barack Obama and his White House screwed up big time when it came to messaging, especially during his first years in office. He passed a stimulus bill that saved or created about 3 million jobs after the Bush-Cheney economic crash. His administration rescued the auto industry. He delivered middle-income Americans a tax cut. Yet he accrued few political benefits from these early actions and was shellacked in the 2010 midterm elections. He and his advisers have acknowledged that they whiffed when it came to combatting the Republicans politically during that stretch. (Remember the Tea Party?) When I was reporting my book on the Obama administration, Showdown, David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist, told me, “Emergencies got in the way of coherent messaging. And we were operating in a political environment when every day is an election day and covered as such.” But when I asked another Obama confidante why Obama and his top aides—intelligent people who had been masterful in promoting a compelling message during the 2008 campaign—had failed so miserably to do so in the White House, that person said there was no good answer.

One aspect of Obama’s messaging that enraged his fellow Democrats was his tendency to go easy on the Republicans. When GOP legislators were obstructionist and blocked or impeded his various initiatives on health care, climate change, gun safety, taxes, immigration reform, and other matters, Obama usually complained about “Congress,” not “Republicans.” Either Obama was reluctant to be too partisan or he believed it was in his political interest to distance himself from the entire institution of Congress. Maybe both. This drove Dems crazy. They were working with him on all this, and they believed he should be bashing the Republicans. Blame the real culprits. Don’t tar the Democrats as part of the problem. Draw a clear line between the parties. Obama would not do so until his 2012 re-election campaign. Consequently (or not), the Democrats lost the House in 2010 and dropped six seats in the Senate. With the 2022 midterms, President Joe Biden, an Obama alum, is confronting a similar situation.

In recent years, there has been an asymmetry in how the Ds and Rs frame the overarching clash between the parties. Democrats tend to claim Republicans are wrong on crucial policy fronts; Republicans assert Democrats are destroying the nation. This distinction has been sharpened during the Trump years. Every day, I receive up to dozens of emails from Trump’s political operation and other GOP entities that depict Democrats as an immediate threat literally bent on turning America into a tyrannical socialist hellhole. They are conspiring with antifa, communists, the media, George Soros, and other dark forces to annihilate your America. This is demagogic fearmongering designed to prey on grievances, anxieties, and resentments. And I’m guessing it works—at least for fundraising— because these solicitations never stop.

The Democrats rarely fire back in kind. Not that they should be reckless and hyperbolic. But the party’s leaders have often been overly reluctant to slam the GOP as a malignant entity responsible for many of the nation’s ills—or at fault for the government’s failure to address them effectively. After all, during the 2020 campaign, Biden pledged to heal the nation’s soul and promoted his ability to forge bipartisan deals. It’s hard to do all that while contending the other side is a pack of devious weasels. But unless the Democrats can persuade voters—including Democratic voters—that national progress is being thwarted by Republicans, they will likely be the targets of citizens dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. Harry Truman won the 1948 election by campaigning ferociously against the Republicans and their “Do-Nothing Congress.” Not many national Democrats have followed that example.

Yet this week, Biden took a step in the Trumanesque direction. When he signed the Inflation Reduction Act—which includes major climate change measures, provisions to lower prescription drug costs, the creation of a minimum corporate tax rate, the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, and beefed-up tax enforcement to nab tax cheats—Biden took a swing at Republicans, pointing out that not one of them backed the legislation.  “And remember,” he said, “every single Republican in Congress voted against this bill. Every single Republican in Congress voted against lowering prescription drug prices, against lowering healthcare costs, against a fairer tax system. Every single Republican—every single one—voted against tackling the climate crisis, against lowering our energy costs, against creating good-paying jobs.”

This was an accurate and effective attack. He could have gone further and noted that the Republicans also voted against legislation that would have capped monthly insulin costs at $35 for privately insured patients. And he also could have said that the popular provisions of his earlier Build Back Better package—adding dental coverage to Medicare, universal pre-K, paid family leave—flamed out because no Republicans would support these initiatives. Certainly, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) were obstacles, but the bigger hurdle was the GOP’s complete opposition. That’s the story Biden and the Democrats need to make clear: Americans can keep their teeth, better educate their children, and be better protected in the workplace, except the Republicans say no.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? The Obama years show it’s not. And Biden’s own instincts and predilections don’t lean this way. But the Ds don’t have much choice. With prices and popular discontent high, they are likely to bear the brunt at the voting booth in November. Unless they can make voters think twice about handing the keys to obstructionist Republicans who say no to popular reforms, support the war on women’s freedom, and back a wannabe autocrat. That message needs to come from the top—and it must be repeated ad nauseum to have a chance of registering. It can’t be a one-off. Biden must become a GOP-decrier, while convincing voters he and the Democrats have racked up significant accomplishments and can do much more if they remain in power. This ain’t easy. But Biden and his crew know what happened in 2010, and they know the shitshow they (and the country) will face if Republicans gain control of the House. (Welcome to the Land of 37 Hunter Biden Investigations!) Democrats ought to hope that Biden has learned from the Obama years and that his recent poke at the GOP was just the beginning.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

American Psychosis Tease of the Week and Special Offer

I certainly hope you have heard—or read—about my new book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. The book comes out next month, and, as a desperate author, I’ve been encouraging folks to preorder the book, which chronicles the seven-decade-long effort of the GOP to encourage and exploit far-right extremism. That is, this wasn’t Trump’s idea. And readers of Our Land still qualify for a special deal: You can purchase a signed edition of American Psychosis now for 35 percent off. Just click HERE. Please help spread the word and tell your friends and frenemies about American Psychosis. There’s no other history of the Republican Party’s embrace of fanaticism, bigotry, and paranoia—from McCarthyism to Bircherism to the Southern strategy to the New Right and the religious right to Limbaughism (as in Rush) to Gingrichism (as in Newt) to Palinism (as in Sarah) to the Tea Party to Trumpism. It’s an ugly tale that the GOP has refused to acknowledge and that the mainstream media has never thoroughly covered. I hope this work will help us better understand the current moment and the political crisis the nation faces.

Here's another sneak peek: Ronald Reagan remains the patron saint of conservative Republicans. He’s hailed by right-wingers as a strong, principled defender of American values. Less known is that he supported the most despicable of far-right extremists. Having won the presidency in 1980 with the assistance of the religious right, most notably the Moral Majority that had recently been created by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and leaders of the New Right, Reagan owed these hate-fueled fundamentalists a huge debt. Falwell had risen to political power by excoriating gay people as an existential threat to America. Gay persons, he said, would “kill you as quick as look at you.” And when Reagan was elected, he took credit—justifiably, given that pollster Lou Harris calculated that “Reagan would have lost the election by one percentage point without the help of the Moral Majority.”

Shortly after Reagan assumed office, several Moral Majority officials declared their desire to kill homosexuals. Greg J. Dixon, a Baptist minister and national secretary of Falwell’s outfit, said that according to “God’s Word,” gay people could be executed. A top Moral Majority official in California stated that homosexuality was a sin that warranted capital punishment. The Reverend Bob Billings, a co-founder of the Moral Majority who was awarded with a job in the Reagan administration, proclaimed at a meeting of the group that he wished he and his fellow gay-bashers could “get in our cars and run them down” when people marched in gay rights parades. Despite all this hate, the Reagan White House repeatedly praised the Moral Majority. In one “Dear Jerry” note, Reagan stated, “By furthering the spiritual strength of the American people, your movement helps fulfill the promise of this great land.” Instead, Falwell’s movement was encouraging animosity and violence.

Reagan enabled far-right hatred. Not only with the Moral Majority. His White House courted and supported Nazi collaborators—actual antisemites and fascists who had worked with Hitler’s forces during World War II and who afterward fashioned themselves fierce anticommunist crusaders. I know. This sounds almost unbelievable. But it happened, and American Psychosis has the receipts.

Feeling Conflicted about Liz Cheney?

Liz Cheney was a die-hard conservative who supported Trump and the GOP down the line, until Dear Leader tried to overturn the 2020 election results. And she and her pops helped sell the Iraq war with lies and misrepresentations, and that led to a geostrategic nightmare and thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands dead Iraqi civilians. Yet Cheney has taken a principled, perhaps heroic, stance in calling out Trump and her party for being profound threats to American democracy. For that, she lost her job in the House this week. So should we be impressed by Cheney? Give her a cheer or two? Do you kind of want to like her now, even if she is a foe of abortion rights, gun safety measures, fairer taxation, expanded voter rights, climate change action, and much more? At least for a little bit? I explored that question here. Let me know what you think.

Dumbass Comment of the Week

Take a break for a week and you can miss a lot of stupidity. Two remarks that occurred during our time away deserve special recognition. Let’s start with Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. Looking to downplay the FBI’s unprecedented execution of a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Turner quipped, “Donald Trump has more classified information in his head than he does in his desk.”

This was not the clever defense that Turner thought it was. Given that Trump has previously released classified information—including to the Russian foreign minister during a 2017 Oval Office meeting (during which he reportedly jeopardized a critical source of intelligence)—it is hardly reassuring to ponder this guy walking around with a bunch of important government secrets knocking about in his noggin. (Biden barred Trump from receiving intelligence briefings after Trump left the White House, citing the former guy’s “erratic behavior.”) Imagine if the FBI had to search Trump’s brain for classified information.

Agent Johnson to Field Command, I’ve entered the former president’s head. It’s hard to see anything in here. It’s pretty dark. All the space is being taken up by these enormous boxes. The biggest boxes. Something’s marked on them… It says…”ego.” There’s almost nothing else here. Wait a sec…I hear this growling and roaring. Man, this is loud. It’s like thunder exploding over and over. Oh…it’s the id... Okay, I’m still searching. What’s that over there? In the corner ...It’s a little boy crying, “Why doesn’t anybody love me?” Hard to hear over the id… That’s it. I don’t see much else.

Maybe we don’t have to worry about the secrets in Trump’s head.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Cancun), often a contender in this competition, wins this round. Speaking at a rally in Nevada, the most disliked man in the US Senate uttered a crass joke suggesting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) might have a penis: “In today’s Democrat Party, how do we know she doesn’t?”

This anti-woke comment was a rather crude remark to make about a colleague. That aside, recall that in the 2016 campaign, after Trump insulted Cruz’s wife and baselessly claimed Cruz’s (crackpot) father had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Cruz bent the knee and endorsed Trump, who he had previously called a “sniveling coward,” “utterly amoral,” and a “pathological liar.” Whatever Cruz might say about Warren, she certainly has more balls than he does.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

Better Call Saul. Good news for my friends who are tired of hearing me rave about Better Call Saul and sad news for the rest of us: The show ended this week. The finale was marvelous. The tug-of-war within Saul Goodman (née Jimmy McGill)—con with a heart of gold or criminal psychopath beyond redemption?—was finally resolved. I won’t say how. But it was done in a masterful, engaging, and somewhat surprising manner. The similar—perhaps deeper—conflict faced by Saul’s onetime partner (in romance, law, and hornswoggling), Kim Wexler, also appeared to have been settled. For six seasons, we watched each struggle with his or her nature, as Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn delivered the best sustained performances in the world of high-quality television, thanks in great part to the magnificent staff writers. This was a show about character—what is it good for?—with many of the supporting players confronting their own dilemmas. The plot twists, the imaginative narratives, the interlacing timelines—it all provided a grand dramatic landscape for this small-scale epic journey of two lawyers, neither of whom was a person of obvious consequence.

Co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould turned this Breaking Bad spin-off into a meditation on the large questions of life by focusing on how these people navigated their desires, dreams, and daily choices. The show’s ceaseless attention to detail was stunning. One of my favorite moments of the final episodes was a montage in which Saul Goodman—now living undercover in Omaha and managing a Cinnabon in a mall—sets up a rather mundane con (which was necessary for his self-preservation). The bit paid homage to action sequences of 1970s cinema and television and was set to the music of Lalo Schifrin, who composed the iconic Mission: Impossible theme.

There was plenty of action throughout Better Call Saul—drug deals, shoot-outs, murders—but what drove the series was the internal drama of the characters. Two months ago, I praised the series:

Sometimes it is hard to write about a book, show, film, or piece of music that is superb and essentially perfect. For years, I have been telling people that Better Call Saul is the best series on television. Better than Succession, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad, the show from which it was spun off. And these are wonderful artistic endeavors. The writing on BCS is tops, the characters effectively and intriguingly drawn….[T]he drama is driven by the often-routine dilemmas and desires confronted by the characters. The pacing is luxurious, the attention to detail extreme and a delight. Early in the series, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a retired cop who ends up working security for OCD-ish drug kingpin and fast-food entrepreneur Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), must take apart a car to find a tracking device. The scene lingers far longer than it would in other shows, as Mike disassembles various portions of the auto. Sounds dull? The suspense builds, and this drawn-out set-piece reflects Mike’s awareness that life—and survival—depends on the small stuff. The producers of the show share this belief, and this scene reveals the series’ secret sauce….

Better Call Saul surprises are ingenious twists that often pivot on the littlest of things. How does a slide ruler lead Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton), a vicious narco, to discover a competitor is building a meth lab? Well, it does, and I won’t tell you how. In the final season, Saul and Kim are running an elaborate con against a former colleague that could bring them a large payout in a class-action case worth millions, while Mike is trying to protect Fring from Salamanca, who is believed dead (but not really), and Nacho Varga, a drug cartel lieutenant (Michael Mando), is caught between Salamanca and Fring and attempting to break free. With six episodes left in the Saul Goodman saga, I have no idea how his story will end…. I want to know, but I don’t want the series to end. Each episode is a well-crafted short story, and together they form the closest thing there can be to TV-show literature.

Well, now we know. The denouement showcased and honored the exceptional work put in by the cast and crew over the six seasons. At the finish line, with Saul facing his toughest challenge, he did not disappoint. He used all his wiles to surprising effect—just as the show’s creators did for seven years.

MoxieCam™

“Why are you making me pose like this?”

“It’s dramatic.”

“It’s just me on a rock at the beach.”

“You look gallant and heroic.”

“Hurry up. I smell something dead over there.”

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

August 5, 2022: The January 6 Rudy Giuliani mystery; American Psychosis tease of the week; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Alex Jones); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 29, 2002: We need to worry about Christian nationalism; American Psychosis tease of the week; Stranger Things jumps a ghoulish shark; Steve Earle honors his forebears; Joni Mitchell’s glorious return; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 23, 2022: Trump’s trap for the GOP; American Psychosis update and tease; Dumbass Comment of the Week (John Cornyn); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.  

July 19, 2022: Announcing the forthcoming release of American Psychosis; Breitbart gets something right; The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and The Player (three decades later!); Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology; and more.

July 16, 2022: Does Steve Bannon buy his own BS?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Catherine Glenn Foster, Lauren Boebert, and Dave Yost); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 12, 2022: It’s about sex; Iran-contra flashback: the day reality died; a dangerous state Supreme Court decision; and more.

July 9, 2022: Why did the Atlantic enable Mitt Romney’s dangerous both-sidesism?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Marjorie Taylor Greene, again); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 2, 2022: Mark Meadows: one helluva liar; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ali Alexander); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

June 28, 2022: The lessons from the right’s 50-year-long crusade to limit the freedom of women; the end of Ozark; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.