The American Dream is Reality: Joe Biden’s First Foreign Trip to the USA: His Commitment to Changing the Future of the United States
President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. He told advisers how much work was still to be done to convince them of the durable nature of that commitment.
The White House has lost sight of its original goals in the last several months, as highlighted by Biden travelling to major corporate meetings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.
During those meeting in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of his allies very upset about what happened on January 6. But the president tried to reassure them that the visceral divides that culminated in the violence that day would heal and the bleak moment in US politics would pass.
Biden told reporters in Belgium that it’s crucial for him to succeed in his agenda, which includes the economy, vaccine, and infrastructure. It is important that we show that we are able to make progress. I think we will be able to do that.
While he is considering running for reelection at 80, he will enter the final two years of his term with much of his agenda now law. Core elements of that agenda were driven by bipartisan consensus. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2003 includes an initial amount of $500 million to establish technology and innovation hubs in parts of the country outside of traditional tech sectors.
“One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence.
Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.
The White House prepares to face Biden on his return from his family vacation in the US Virgin Islands, and it is this perspective that he can learn from.
The idea of showing government can work was mocked, according to a Biden adviser. “That’s literally what’s happening now.”
There are still challenges that need to be solved. Even though inflation seems to be easing, it is still high. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.
Biden’s approval ratings, while ticking up, remain low and his age remains a real, if less publicly addressed, concern held by Democrats as they wait for an official decision about whether he will seek reelection.
But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.
It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team now believes the reelection campaign will be launched in the weeks ahead.
White House officials believe the salience of his agenda is anunderappreciated part of their ability to defy the expectations of GOP gains in the novembers and that this is critical to what comes next. The agenda that is now in the implementation phase is unaffected by the prospect of divided government and the narrow legislative pathway it brings.
As the nation heads into the New Year, it forms the foundation for even stronger achievements, according to Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle.
Biden, advisers said, has laid down strict directives to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation in the months ahead.
A senior administration official said that the message from the top was not subtle. We have to get it right but in the moments we don’t, we need to fix it.
“A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.
Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal, in particular, as a central policy plank of his campaign as Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals – none of which included a viable way to pass a bitterly divided Congress.
The proposals also represented a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not entirely unchanging, economic orthodoxy. Biden would oversee the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He’d do so in many cases with Republican support.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/politics/joe-biden-2022/index.html
The Foundation of a Coherent Policy Agenda for the Reformation of the United States, as taught by Biden during his time as Vice President
“This was the right moment for his theory of the case,” Feldman said. He could apply the principles he has learned throughout his career.
Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.
The chief economist of Biden’s office, who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers, said that the president distinguishes between short-term and long-term in his view of the economy. These have always been important to his economic thinking.
The animating principles of Biden’s 2020 campaign hardly diverged from the key themes outlined by Donilon, Biden’s in-house mind-meld, in the 22-page memo he drafted in early 2015 as the then-vice president weighed jumping into the 2016 race.
The same story about the importance ofbreathing room and his father’s saying about the dignity of work are still associated with his speeches as a president.
The counselor to the president, who was part of the effort to lead the legislative effort, pointed out that the lines had been drawn from Biden’s days as a senator through his time as Vice President and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
Biden wrote a book detailing his decision not to run for president as he dealt with the pain of his son Beau’s fight with, and eventual death from, brain cancer. The book tour that followed was seen by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in his decision to run in 2020.
If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.
Even though they were scaled back during the legislative process, officials designed the infrastructure, manufacturing, research and development and climate proposals into interlocking pieces.
“At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.
Adhering to the term industrial policy isn’t universally embraced. Deese prefers the modern American industrial strategy. In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.
There is a resurgence in research funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. The elevation of labor unions and a focus on creating the conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/politics/joe-biden-2022/index.html
Todd Biden on Capitol Hill: From the Epidemic to the Rise of China, and on to the Emerging Technologies of Semiconductors
Politically, these issues are politically popular and have nothing to do with Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.
The bipartisan importance of the CHIPS and Science law is due to the fact that the tiny chips essential for everything from cars and washing machines to advanced weapons systems are located in Semiconductors. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.
For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer. The law that Young voted for has caused new private sector investment and commitments in the last several months.
The epidemic. The rise of China as key feature of policy making in both parties. The president was animated by the idea of long-term economic incentives that would connect workers and communities.
“There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” said Kaufman, the former Delaware senator, longtime Biden Senate chief of staff and one of the president’s closest friends. The guy who is well qualified to be president has experience.
In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Another incumbent, or another moment, and advisers note that it wouldn’t be a question of if Biden would win. He wouldn’t have run.
The voters reject some of the most extreme voices in the race for governor and Secretary of State in critical races for the 2020 election.
In the months leading up to the midterm elections, Biden had started regularly recounting the experience with his foreign counterparts on that first foreign trip in an effort to underscore the stakes.
In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.
If the US keeps its focus, it will be better positioned to lead the world economy than any other nation.
The Labor Department Rule on Retirement Investments: Why Does Congress Need to Adopt a “Wake-Breaking” Agenda?
The resolution was passed through congress by republicans because they said the rule was “woke”, pushed a liberal agenda on Americans, and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines.
Opponents of the rule have argued that it politicizes retirement investments and that the Biden administration is using it as a way to push a liberal agenda on Americans.
The resolution was passed by both houses of Congress but only the Senate voted with Democrat Jon Tester of Montana voting with Republicans.
Opponents of the rule could try to override a veto, but at this point it appears unlikely they could get the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to do so.
A simple majority was required to pass the resolution. It passed on a vote of 50 to 46 with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana voting with Republicans.
Republican lawmakers advanced it under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to roll back regulations from the executive branch without needing to clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that is necessary for most legislation.
McConnell said that the Biden Administration wanted to let Wall Street use workers’ hard-earned savings to pursue left-wing political initiatives.
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said at a news conference on Tuesday, “What’s happened here is the woke and weaponized bureaucracy at the Department of Labor has come out with new regulations on retirement funds, and they want retirement funds to be invested in things that are consistent with their very liberal, left-wing agenda.”
Supporters of the rule argue that it is not a mandate – it allows, but does not require, the consideration of environmental, social and governance factors in investment selection.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday that Republicans are “using the same tired attacks we’ve heard for a while now that this is more wokeness. … Republicans don’t understand, that the Labor Department rule doesn’t impose a mandate.
The 2022 Rule of Retirement and a Motion to Rescind a Washington, DC, Crime Law: Why Is It Necessary?
He said that the rule was not about ideological preference, but about looking at the biggest picture possible to maximize returns and minimize risk.
The statement of administration policy saying that Biden would veto the measure similarly states, “the 2022 rule is not a mandate – it does not require any fiduciary to make investment decisions based solely on ESG factors. The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis.”
Republicans are also working to advance a measure to rescind a controversial Washington, DC, crime law – which critics argue is soft on violent criminals – with a simple majority vote in the Senate.
Many Democrats oppose overriding the DC law. They argue that local officials should make their own laws free from interference from the federal government, since they often promote state and local rights.
Legislation passed by congress would endanger the retirement savings of individuals across the country and that’s the reason I signed this veto. They couldn’t take into consideration investments that wouldn’t be impacted by climate, impacted by overpaying executives, and that’s why I decided to veto it – it makes sense to veto it,” Biden said in a video posted to social media Monday afternoon.