The Republican Party faces a core challenge
Credit: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
This Wednesday, at noon in Washington DC, Joe Biden will stand before Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, raise his right hand, place his left on The Bible, and recite the oath of office, thus becoming the 46th President of the United States.
Moments later, he will deliver his Inaugural Address. Traditionally declaimed before a vast audience gathered in the National Mall, it will look different this time. Though much of the American establishment will attend, including senior Congressional figures, high-ranking military, and former Presidents (with one notable exception), social distancing will rule; and the multitudes will be absent, exiled by the pandemic and the security clampdown. No chance this time of claims of a bigger crowd than Obama’s. Nevertheless, mindful of the huge TV audience, Biden’s speechwriters will have spent weeks kicking around ideas, searching for that elusive phrase that will echo through the ages: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, or JFK’s “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”. Perhaps Biden might be inspired by a phrase from Lincoln’s 1865 address: “With malice for none, with charity for all …. let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds”.
Pause for a moment on Joe Biden the man, and his journey to the highest office. Son of a used-car salesman, he was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a former coal mining and railway town which, though now somewhat revitalised, once epitomised industrial decline. A mediocre student but a natural politician, Biden won a seat in the US Senate aged just twenty-nine. His thirty-five year Senate career was defined by pragmatism: stubbornly centrist, he consistently built bridges to Republicans to get things done. 2020 was his third run for the Presidency, after failures in 1988, when he plagiarised Neil Kinnock, and 2008, when he never left the launchpad. And he has suffered more than his share of personal tragedy: his first wife and infant daughter killed in a car crash in 1972, his son, Beau Biden, dying of brain cancer in 2015.
Much is expected of a new President’s first hundred days. Biden intends to start with the pandemic: more masks, more tests, accelerated vaccination programmes, $1,400 stimulus payments to the hard-up. He has also promised to invest in job creation, renew America’s decrepit infrastructure, reverse Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans, revive Obamacare, rebuild relations with allies, and rejoin the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
But Biden knows that there is a bigger challenge out there: reuniting a profoundly divided nation; “healing America”. Recent polling suggests 64% of Republican voters believe Congress should have reversed Biden’s victory. Moreover, decades of rising inequality, compounded by the disproportionate impact of the 2008 financial crisis on blue collar Americans, have convinced a “left behind” generation that the American establishment is indifferent to them. And the Democrats have alienated small town America, whether through Obama in 2008 describing their inhabitants as “clinging to guns and religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like them”, or Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”. Trump filled the vacuum, but over-promised and under-delivered: factories and coal mines continued to close. So Biden has an opportunity. But it will be neither quick nor easy, demanding an expensive combination of short term job creation in America’s forgotten towns and long term investment in America’s broken education system.
Racial divisions have also deepened, stoked by a succession of toxic Trump pronouncements: among them that the white supremacists at Charlottesville included “very fine people”, and that four Democrat Congresswomen of colour should “go back where they came from”. Biden has promised $30 billion of investment in businesses in communities of colour, and a Justice Department focussed on civil rights, criminal justice reform and, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, community-based policing. Sensible ideas, but he will need them to bring real change.
The Republican Party also faces a core challenge; a fork in the road. In July 2017, I predicted that the Trump Presidency would remain chaotic and dysfunctional and could end in disgrace. So it proved. But Trump is not a man who will now focus on building his Presidential library. The opposite: he will continue to foment anger and resentment amongst his followers and looks to be contemplating a 2024 run. If seventeen Republican Senators vote with the Democrats on the impeachment charges, they can convict, and also disqualify Trump from future public office. In short, they can move on and reassert traditional Republican values. Or they can defend their former president and face a future as the voice of the angry white man in an increasingly diverse America.
Kim Darroch’s memoir, Collateral Damage is out now (William Collins)
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