Barack Obama in 2008. Kamala Harris in 2024. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images, AP
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When she came forward as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this summer, Kamala Harris offered what has become a standard tribute to the man who had anointed her. “Joe Biden’s legacy of accomplishment over the past three years is unmatched in modern history,” she said. “In one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who served two terms in office.”
Within Biden’s party, it has become settled wisdom that he is “the most legislatively successful president since LBJ” (Democratic strategist Bob Shrum) or perhaps even “since the New Deal” (Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer). Comparisons to FDR and LBJ are also casually thrown around in mainstream organs like Politico (“In the long run, his first two years may be remembered as akin to LBJ when it comes to moving his agenda through Congress”) and the New York Times (“a roster of achievement that surpasses Bill Clinton and Barack Obama”). When Democrats began pressing him to give up the nomination after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the Times reported that Biden held back in part because “he believes his polling should reflect what he sees as his accomplishments.” He made a version of this case in public. Presented by NBC’s Lester Holt with concerns from fellow Democrats about his age and ability to govern, Biden replied, “I think one of the arguments that get made, you have the most successful presidency of any president in modern history, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt.”
It is not yet clear if Harris or her allies recognize the full scale of the political devastation she actually inherits. Gallup measured President Biden’s approval rating at under 36 percent before he ended his reelection campaign, lower than any other president at this point in their term going back decades. A Pew survey pegged him at 32 percent, a level just a few points higher than Donald Trump’s standing after January 6, 2021.
What’s astonishing is not merely that it required a televised meltdown for Democrats to intervene but that no plausible challenger even tried to take on Biden during the primaries. Perhaps they all really believe what they have been saying: that Biden bestrode history as a colossus and had therefore earned the right to another four years. Why should he be confined to one-term status alongside the forsaken Jimmy Carter, rather than given a second term like Clinton and Obama, whose achievements he so obviously surpassed?
For Biden, this sense of entitlement was wrapped up in personal resentments. For Democrats, much deeper questions are at stake. The notion that Biden’s record transcended Clinton’s and, especially, Obama’s is not merely an exercise in partisan cheerleading or presidential ego-stroking. It is a point of dogma advanced for a well-defined political project to change the Democratic Party. The operation to repudiate the Obama legacy has been spread by a lavishly financed propaganda campaign, and its precepts have hardened into conventional wisdom. It brought the Democrats to the brink of catastrophe, from which they have pulled back in the nick of time — without quite understanding, however, how they got there in the first place.
The issue of Biden’s age, in some respects, has obfuscated the danger that the Democrats find themselves in, glossing over a cascading series of poor decisions that stretches back nearly ten years. If Harris wants to put the Democrats back on a winning track, she will have to grasp the extent to which Biden explicitly abandoned the Obama model of campaigning and governing for a new one that is vastly less successful at both. This will entail moving her rhetoric in a pragmatic direction on issues such as immigration, which Harris has already begun to do, and convincing voters that she is a moderate, which her choice of Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate won’t help.
It will not mean compromising her ambitions and settling for incremental change, however. Because the truth is that, despite the rhetoric about transformative change, Biden’s formula did not come even close to matching the accomplishments of Obama, let alone those of FDR or LBJ.
Obama was elected and reelected as president by decisive margins. He enacted sweeping economic and social reforms that have withstood Republican attacks. And then the most remarkable turn of events happened: Democrats talked themselves into believing the whole experience had been a disappointment and set out to ensure they didn’t repeat it. Indeed, the Obama model remains neglected even as the party prepares to nominate the perfect use case for its political formula: a young, telegenic, pathbreaking, multiracial urban moderate in desperate need of a message that can appeal to Middle America.
Democrats know exactly how to design a winning campaign for a candidate like this. Or, at least, they used to. As if waking from a long trance, Democrats have suddenly realized that they are experiencing sensations they haven’t felt since 2008. Excitement. Fun. Winning. Remember all that? How did we ever decide it was a bad thing?
Tim Walz has injected some Everyman appeal into Harris’s campaign but has to convince moderate voters he’s not too liberal. Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images
The sheer number of Obama’s accomplishments is so large that, like Donald Trump’s misconduct, it’s difficult for a person to keep it all in their head at once, paradoxically making it easier to believe none of it amounted to anything.
Most people remember Obamacare, though few realize what a massive conglomeration of reforms were encompassed in that single law. It turned the market for individual insurance, which was small and virtually useless for anybody with less than perfect health, into a subsidized and regulated exchange that provides affordable coverage to more than 20 million people. It expanded Medicaid to cover an additional 25 million Americans. It closed the “doughnut hole” in Medicare’s prescription-drug coverage, which had forced millions of senior citizens to shell out thousands of dollars for their medicine. And it implemented a wide array of cost reforms that have helped bring down medical inflation with the result that the American health system now spends less money while covering more people.
Obama inherited the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression and, in response, passed a $787 billion stimulus, which was one of the largest enacted in American history, almost equal in size to the stimulus in the New Deal. Obama nearly doubled its size with an additional $700 billion, though that spending was pulled out of Congress in small chunks that attracted little attention. Just as Roosevelt famously saved the banks by imposing a banking holiday, Obama saved the banking system, which was teetering when he assumed office, by imposing stress tests. At the time, the economist Paul Krugman lambasted the stress tests in his high-profile column, which shaped public opinion of them, though Krugman eventually conceded the program worked.
What people most remember about Obama’s record, other than Obamacare, is that he bailed out Wall Street. Except he didn’t. They’re remembering the bailout that occurred in October 2008 under the Bush administration. The “Obama bailout” has been repeated so often it has become canon in the public memory — for example, Semafor’s recent claim that “Barack Obama and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner bailed out the bottom lines of banks and financial institutions.” In truth, Obama’s main contribution to the Bush-era Wall Street bailout was to use the leftover funds to rescue the auto industry. The move not only saved the industry, its suppliers, and quite likely the entire upper Midwest from economic collapse, it also saved the U.S. government $100 billion in pension bailouts and health subsidies it would have had to shell out had it let Detroit go bankrupt.
With the Dodd-Frank law, Obama implemented sweeping reforms to ensure another financial crisis wouldn’t occur, creating higher capital requirements on systemically important firms, requiring investment firms to do what’s best for their customers, and founding a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect people from scams, among other measures.
And there was so much more. The administration enacted the largest green-energy-subsidy program in American history ($90 billion of the stimulus), bolstering a fledgling domestic wind sector and creating a solar industry virtually from scratch. Greenhouse-gas emissions declined, and the administration made landmark climate deals with China, slingshotting those agreements into the first global climate treaty. Obama raised taxes on the wealthy and cut them on the poor and middle class by expanding the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, causing a major and lasting effect on income inequality. It would consume too much space to list the smaller Obama achievements, but an abbreviated list includes nationalizing the student-loan industry, allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, expanding eligibility for overtime pay, cracking down on for-profit colleges, banning hidden credit-card fees, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act banning sex-based wage discrimination.
How has all this been relegated to second-tier status in the Democratic imagination?
The left had a distant, often critical relationship with Obama throughout his two terms. Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs once referred dismissively to “the professional left,” reflecting the administration’s notion that their criticisms did not express the views of a major voting constituency but instead that of a small clique of progressive elites they felt free to ignore. Some progressive objections centered on ideological differences, such as the strict enforcement of immigration law by a president activists disparaged as the “deporter-in-chief.” Others were related to his use of drones to strike suspected terrorists. But the protests of the left generally centered on the belief that Obama was too conciliatory in negotiating with Republicans and unable or unwilling to use his platform to rally the country behind his domestic-policy vision.
The main complaint against Obama emerged retrospectively: He had mishandled the economic crisis by failing to pass a big enough stimulus package, setting the stage for an agonizingly slow recovery that did not approach full employment until after he left office. Obama, believing Congress would hesitate to spend enough to fully cushion the expected economic blow, asked for less stimulus money than even his own economists believed would be needed to prevent millions of Americans from losing their jobs.
But in 2009, the very idea of fiscal stimulus was radical. Republicans were insisting that deficit spending would make the economy worse, and even many moderates adopted versions of this belief — a paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff purported to show that a national debt exceeding 90 percent of gross domestic product would impair economic growth. (The conclusion was revealed years later to have been predicated on a spreadsheet error.) Mainstream media often assumed the deficit, not the recession, was the main crisis and treated Obama’s arguments for stimulus as reckless. Congress further trimmed down Obama’s stimulus in a misguided effort to prevent waste. Even if more clever legislative tactics could have gotten moderate Republicans to approve a larger stimulus, which may or may not be true, the constraint was Congress, not Obama.
Obama is also incorrectly remembered for embracing austerity in a series of painful budget negotiations with Republicans in Congress. In 2010, Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for extending a payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. (Bernie Sanders made a famous long speech denouncing this deal, but here the Sanders position of raising taxes on the rich faster would have meant more austerity.) Obama then later tried, unsuccessfully, to strike a deal with Republicans to reduce the long-term deficit, while also agreeing to onerous automatic spending caps. But these efforts were not a pivot to austerity; rather they were an attempt to neutralize fears of a long-term debt crisis to unlock even more short-term stimulus.
History has likewise rewritten Obama’s health-care reform and how extreme it was actually seen as at the time. “Obama’s biggest ideas were neoliberal: The Affordable Care Act, his greatest domestic-policy achievement, improved access to health care by altering private health-insurance markets,” complained Farhad Manjoo of the Times in 2019, arguing that a public takeover of the health-care sector would have been preferable. But the very idea of spending resources to cover the uninsured in any way, public or private, was considered irresponsible back then. The Washington Post likened the president’s desire to cover the uninsured to asking for “candy” or “dessert” rather than nutritious, deficit-reducing fare. Obama, like Roosevelt, was fighting against the tide of both mass and elite opinion.
The hostile environment in which Obama fought for his agenda was forgotten when he left office. That the context changed is itself evidence of his success — his critics’ hysterical arguments that the U.S. was heading into hyperinflationary fiscal crisis or that Obamacare would collapse have been so discredited that they’ve disappeared completely. Now, though, he has been relegated to a mere appendage of the Reagan era with a 2022 Times story asserting that the neoliberal model of Reagan and Thatcher had been the “guiding mind-set” for both the Clinton and Obama administrations.
When Donald Trump surprisingly won the 2016 election, pundits widely predicted that he would erase Obama’s legacy. This fatalistic assumption colored public thinking of Obama’s presidency, as if all that effort had been for naught. “Barack Obama has been a historic President but perhaps not a consequential one,” sneered a Wall Street Journal editorial. But few of his domestic achievements — other than raising taxes on the rich and that only in part — were repealed.
What Trump’s election did accomplish, in a roundabout fashion, was to get the Democratic Party to abandon the Obama legacy.
That Obama’s presidency ended in the election of Trump reflected, in part, his inability to map out a succession plan. His mistake had two components. First, he selected Biden as his vice-president in 2008 on the assumption that Biden would be too old to run for office after a second Obama term. Then, when Biden expressed interest in running anyway in 2016, Obama discouraged him, instead favoring Hillary Clinton. Biden knew Clinton could lose because the public harbored a deep distrust of her personally dating back to the 1990s, and even though Obama had exploited these same suspicions to defeat her in 2008, he seemed to forget how vulnerable that made her.
Obama was also a victim of his own success. The relative ease of his two election victories, and his generational strength among young voters, caused Democrats to underestimate the challenges he had overcome and the persistent skepticism of liberal ideas that remained in the electorate. Obama made winning elections look so inevitable that Democrats started thinking they no longer needed the precautions that had enabled those victories in the first place.
Clinton, his designated heir, started the 2016 race by positioning herself slightly to Obama’s left. “The Democratic Party is moving left fast, and she knows she needs to move with it,” observed Politico at the outset of her campaign. The unexpectedly strong challenge from Bernie Sanders pulled her even farther left. Her strategy to fend off Sanders involved partially co-opting his left-wing economic platform and outflanking him on race and gender with the explicit identity-politics rhetoric that Obama had avoided, exciting activists and left-wing academics by using phrases like “systemic racism” and “intersectional.”
Clinton’s defeat flabbergasted most Democrats. There is a natural human inclination to believe that large events must have large causes. And so progressive intellectuals quickly leaped to the conclusion that Trump’s victory could not have turned on such minor factors as Clinton’s limited personal appeal or James Comey’s bungling. Instead, it was an indictment of the entire Obama era.
Six months after Obama left office, Larry Kramer, a law professor and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, convened a meeting at the ‘21’ club in Manhattan. The group included an array of leading philanthropists, think-tank heads, donors, progressive writers, and academics. As Michael Tomasky, one of the participants, later reported, the group continued its discussions the following day at the Ford Foundation, where its members began to envision themselves as the founders of a new intellectual paradigm that would move beyond the failed neoliberalism of the Obama era.
Neoliberalism is a term of art that has infinite permutations. In general, it is employed as a form of abuse (very few people describe themselves as neoliberal) by the left to describe shared ideas of liberals and conservatives. The implication is that the New Deal liberalism that used to dominate American politics, and that favored workers and government intervention, gave way to a more conservative system dedicated to free markets above all.
Trump’s 2016 victory, they believed, was a long-brewing backlash against the neoliberal regime. The failures of the system were multiple. Neoliberal elites were unduly reverential of market forces. Even Democratic measures to expand government were too market based. “Obama policies like the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, TPP, and the Earned Income Tax Credit were designed either to harness markets or to interfere with them as little as possible,” Kramer argued. The economy had grown too slowly because neoliberalism placed too much weight on holding down inflation. “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” argued a 2020 Hewlett strategy memo urging governments to increase their deficit spending “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”
Another failure of neoliberalism, one that came into tighter focus after the George Floyd murder, was its habit of using race-neutral policies. “Many things, of course, allowed Donald Trump to rise to power. But one likely factor was the failure of racial liberalism, thinned by neoliberalism,” wrote Felicia Wong and Kyle Strickland in a report for the Roosevelt Institute. “Racial liberalism” describes Obama’s practice of avoiding the explicit discussions of race favored by left-wing academics and activists.
The anti-neoliberal diagnosis contained some elements of truth. The Keynesian New Deal consensus that once ruled American politics had disappeared, and the intellectual center of gravity in American economic policy did move rightward from the 1970s to the end of the Obama era. The parties did agree on free trade, and they often overlooked the harm it did to communities that relied on manufacturing.
However, the theory has several serious defects. It exaggerates the progressivism of the old Democratic Party, which, even at the height of the New Deal, carefully balanced business interests against labor and vigorously expanded free trade. A fact anti-neoliberalism has even more difficulty accounting for is that the two parties moved farther apart, not closer together, during the so-called neoliberal era. The Keynesian consensus eroded because the Republicans abandoned it. The premise that they have been joined in a neoliberal consensus can’t explain why Republicans and Democrats have fought in increasingly vicious terms over everything, especially the role of government. A model that envisions a political divide pitting Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on one side and Obama and Paul Ryan on the opposing side can explain very little of what has happened in modern American politics.
Yet anti-neoliberalism had some key advantages that made it irresistible to its progressive audience. It supplied an explanation for Trump’s victory that did not require progressives to compromise on their political values in order to allow Democrats to regain power. To the contrary, this theory allowed — nay, demanded — the fulfillment of every progressive wish. A Green New Deal, a jobs guarantee, higher minimum wage, Medicare for All — these proposals were not only possible but politically necessary to defeat Trump.
The plan devised by Kramer and his allies explained how anti-neoliberal thought would be disseminated. “It makes sense to begin with the academy and think tanks — though we will not want to confine ourselves exclusively to these even in the beginning — and to work out from there in subsequent stages,” a Hewlett strategy document explained. Hewlett poured $140 million into grants to writers, magazines (The Atlantic, Washington Monthly, and The American Prospect, among many others), conferences, podcasts, academic centers (at universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown), and think tanks. The Roosevelt Institute’s budget more than tripled. The massive upsurge in demand for essays, columns, and lectures assailing neoliberalism was met rapidly with a booming supply.
Whatever the merits of their underlying analysis of American politics, the theory of change laid out by its funders was fully vindicated. The surge of anti-neoliberal thought transformed conventional wisdom within the elite ranks of the progressive movement. It rendered Obama’s legacy an orphan and created the expectation that the Democratic Party was racing into a bold new era in which the political and fiscal constraints that he had operated within had disappeared completely.
When the 2020 primary began, the race to the left that had begun four years before accelerated into a sprint. In January 2019, the Times posed the question of “whether there is a large audience of primary voters open to promises of incremental change and political compromise, or whether the ascendant liberal wing is now fully dominant, defining the party’s agenda around transformational goals like enacting single-payer health care and breaking up big banks.” The question was no longer even who led the party but whether moderates had a place in it at all.
Economist Brad DeLong, a former Clinton-era Treasury staffer, captured the defeated mood of the party’s deposed center-left vanguard. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong tweeted. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”
The atmosphere of the primary campaign was unlike anything the party had experienced in the era of elected primaries. Almost every candidate was pressured to rewrite their platform on the fly to keep pace with the escalating demands from activist groups. No candidate suffered more harm from this dynamic than Kamala Harris.
Party leaders and the media treated Harris as a first-rank contender at the outset of the campaign. Her kickoff rally attracted nearly 20,000 spectators, which drew comparisons to the enormous crowds that flocked to Obama’s early primary rallies. Rachel Maddow, after interviewing Harris, gushed, “I think there’s a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.”
The first problem Harris encountered was that her background as a prosecutor made her suspect in the eyes of a movement that considered the entire criminal-justice system illegitimate. BuzzFeed News dismissed her 2006 book, Smart on Crime, as “a relic of an era in which the country’s conversation on criminal justice focused not on reducing arrests or diagnosing racial injustice in the system, but preventing offenders from committing crimes.”
The word relic reflected a belief Harris herself appeared to share. At times she found herself apologizing for her past deeds — “The bottom line is the buck stops with me and I take full responsibility for what my office did” — almost as if she had been a criminal rather than a prosecutor.
Disavowing her main credential was only the beginning of Harris’s efforts to placate her insatiable skeptics. At various points, she raised her hand onstage to avow that she would abolish private insurance and decriminalize border crossings and made vaguely positive noises about defunding the police and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, positions that poll at levels only slightly higher than mandatory puppy euthanasia.
In the long run, the biggest beneficiary of these efforts to placate the left has been the 2024 Trump campaign, which has eagerly recirculated Harris’s past left-wing positions. The immediate beneficiary of the Democrats’ race to the left, however, was the Biden campaign. Left for dead by the activists who assumed his time had passed, Biden opted out of the fervent progressive one-upmanship and was able to capitalize on the vacuum in the center. Biden’s most effective moment of the primary came at a July debate when numerous candidates attacked Obama for having deported too many unauthorized immigrants. “Mr. Vice-President,” taunted Julian Castro, whose campaign was demanding border decriminalization, “it looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t.”
Biden used these attacks to link himself to Obama. “I hope the next debate we can talk about our answers to fix the things that Trump has broken, not how Barack Obama made all these mistakes,” he said. While he could no longer muster the forceful stage presence he had used to steamroll Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debate, Biden was able to cast himself as the successor to a popular presidency. And Biden won.
But, flush with victory over his more progressive rivals, Biden made a peculiar decision. Rather than pivot to the center, as nominees traditionally do, he instead pivoted away from it. Biden agreed to a “unity task force” to adjust his platform in the direction of Warren and Sanders. The new Biden platform endorsed the “recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities,” a rollback of immigration enforcement, jobs programs like those effectively used during the New Deal, and other elements that borrowed from his vanquished rivals. He proceeded to staff his administration with officials loyal to Warren and Sanders.
Devotees of the anti-neoliberal movement gained special access. Jennifer Harris, who had been running a Hewlett Foundation grant program called the Economy and Society Initiative, which sought to counter neoliberal thinking, joined the administration and became, as the Times put it in a flattering profile, “the Queen Bee of Bidenomics,” who “had a hand in everything from making the case for industrial policy to designing a new framework for trade.” Twenty-five grantees from Harris’s project, as well as two fellow Hewlett employees, joined her in the administration.
Why Biden chose to conduct his victory like a surrender has never been fully articulated. The crisis atmosphere of the pandemic, and polling that suggested a Democratic landslide, contributed to a belief that Democrats stood on the precipice of a transformational moment akin to 1933 with Biden cast as the new FDR.
In part, Biden’s strategy reflected the experience of the preceding decade. The economic elite’s obsessive fear of inflation and runaway deficits had crippled the recovery. The Obama administration mistakenly assumed that if its initial stimulus proved too small, it could easily go back to Congress and get more spending. And even when the economy reached “full employment” under Trump, contrary to the fears of the debt hawks, inflation never appeared and interest rates remained low. Biden absorbed those lessons, ignoring the inflation hawks and deciding it would be better to overstimulate the economy than to understimulate it.
There was also a political calculation at work. Obama kept the professional left at arm’s length in part because he didn’t need it to stir up enthusiasm. Obama’s personality and identity created an authentic wellspring of excitement in the Democratic voting base. His political advisers didn’t need to manufacture support by pumping up the historical scale of his achievements.
To the contrary, Obama grasped that the perception he was enacting radical change was dangerous. He cast his policies as commonsense reforms, constantly expressing empathy for conservative values. The Promise, Jonathan Alter’s book about Obama’s first year, has a revealing scene in which a member of Congress greets Michelle Obama and excitedly touts the stimulus as the greatest anti-poverty legislation in a generation. “Shh!” she replies. Obama’s agenda did transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor, thus also from white people to Black people. It was Obama’s Republican critics who highlighted the transformational implications of those programs. Rush Limbaugh infamously attacked health-care reform as “reparations” on the grounds that African Americans would benefit disproportionately from it.
Biden, lacking Obama’s personal appeal, courted the professional left not only with policy but also with rhetoric. If the excitement didn’t bubble up naturally from the grass roots, he would manufacture it from the top down with ringing declarations of transformational change. This included using explicit racial-justice language.
“It’s way past time to put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,” announced Biden in July 2020. He also said he wanted “a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now” and “to change the paradigm,” employing a term the anti-neoliberal movement has imbued with almost mystical importance. The word paradigm appears 33 times in the Roosevelt Institute’s strategy memo and 60 times in Hewlett’s.
By hiring the anti-neoliberal movement’s personnel, adopting its rhetoric, and attempting to implement its agenda, Biden captured a valuable asset. Progressive intellectuals have relentlessly touted his world-historical successes, not only in advancing policy change but, in their view, in transforming the very contours of the American political economy.
Biden can certainly boast of meaningful policy accomplishments. But the idea that they rank alongside those of Roosevelt or Johnson or even Obama is, upon examination, ludicrous.
Biden’s policy legacy can be summarized quickly. His most prominent is the Inflation Reduction Act, which is anchored in large-scale green-energy investments. He also gained Republican support to increase spending on infrastructure, along with passing another bill to invest in strategic domestic battery and microchip industries and more scientific research.
Unlike Obama, or even Bill Clinton (who expanded the earned-income tax credit and created a health-insurance program for low-income children), Biden failed to secure any permanent expansions of the safety net. His ambitious plans to create a new child tax credit, universal child care, and prekindergarten collapsed. He did increase subsidies for insurance under Obamacare, but that extension lasts only through 2025.
Even Biden’s impressive investments in physical infrastructure have a large asterisk. As Politico discovered, as of April, only 17 percent of the funds allocated in his three main infrastructure laws had been spent. A Trump administration with a Republican Congress could cancel the scheduled spending and use the savings to finance more tax cuts. Even if Trump didn’t have a Republican Congress, he could probably redirect large chunks of the funding to non-green projects or to firms run by his cronies.
Biden did pass massive fiscal stimulus during the pandemic that helped bring the economy back to peak form with low unemployment and rising wages. But he is not the only president to have fast growth with wage gains reaching the bottom of the labor market — the same thing occurred under Clinton and Trump. And Biden’s impressive recovery did come along with a large spike of inflation for which his policies bear a small measure of responsibility.
The ideological vision of Biden’s program entailed rebuilding the industrial middle class through a combination of robust unionization and bolstering the manufacturing sector. But there is no evidence of success in either effort. Manufacturing employment is no higher than it was before the pandemic, and the rate of union membership slightly decreased.
Some political scientists who measure legislative output do not rank Biden on the same level as Obama. The leading gauge of major legislation ranks “the 2009–10 Congress ahead of its 2021–22 counterpart in both the total quantity of major laws enacted and the number of measures that moved federal policy leftward. And it’s hard to make a convincing case that Biden has signed any bill into law that approaches the substantive and political importance of the Affordable Care Act,” argues political scientist David Hopkins, pointing to data collected by two other experts, Matthew Grossman and David Mayhew. “So far, there is little evidence that the Biden administration’s policy legacy will be as large as that of Obama’s first term,” Grossman tells me.
The campaign to elevate Biden to historical greatness has been driven by a wing of the progressive movement that gained influence and is determined to depict the handiwork of that access as a staggering triumph. The most obvious measure of Biden’s actual impact was that his presidency was so crushingly unpopular he was almost certainly doomed to defeat against Trump.
The original rationale for abandoning Obama’s political and governing legacy was that it alienated voters. Obama failed to lift Hillary Clinton to victory, therefore Democrats needed to devise an entirely new approach to economic policy and social-justice rhetoric to defeat Trumpism.
Inconveniently for the authors of this new approach, their indictment of Obama attacked him for worrying too much about inflation, crime, and illegal immigration. It is not entirely their fault that inflation, crime, and immigration became massive political liabilities at precisely the moment they persuaded Democrats to stop fearing those things. But it does suggest the need for some reconsideration as to why their populist agenda has proved so unpopular.
Instead, they have clung even more tightly to the formula.
In the waning days of Biden’s candidacy, when Democrats were organizing a plan to replace him with a candidate capable of winning, he received a boost from a progressive faction led by Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Biden, who historically has been a moderate Democrat, was smart enough to recognize the political power of the progressive movement,” said Sanders.
It soon emerged that they had struck a deal. Biden would endorse a new list of progressive policy demands, and they would throw their weight behind him and quash the rebellion spreading in the party ranks. It was a solution to the Democrats’ political crisis that, in its clumsy transactionalism, had all the creativity of the Brezhnev-era Kremlin.
Biden’s progressive allies explained to CNN “they trust Biden to be more aligned with their agenda than they do Harris — and that is part of why so many have stuck with him.” At a moment when the decision could have swung either way and they held maximum leverage, they cared less about preventing the party from drifting into defeat than about preventing it from falling into the hands of the dreaded neoliberals.
After Biden finally gave in, a slew of essays appeared touting Biden’s successes and warning Harris not to return to the Obama-era neoliberal agenda. Harris had a “mixed” record, having “backed Barack Obama’s approach of putting most of the burden of the financial crisis on homeowners rather than banks,” argued Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar. “To win, she also needs to reaffirm her commitment to the core principles of Bidenomics.”
Obviously, not every choice Obama made was correct, nor is every Biden policy misguided. But it’s a sign of how deeply the conventional wisdom about the past two Democratic presidencies has sunk in that a columnist could warn a candidate to avoid following the path of the president who decisively won reelection and instead follow the one who had historically low approval ratings — without even explaining the discrepancy.
The past two Democratic presidencies present contrasting models. One is to stock your administration with progressive-movement elites, embrace their policy goals, cast your agenda in grandiose terms, and accomplish only modest changes in policy. The other, older model is to ignore progressive elites, craft rhetorical appeals designed to placate nervous moderates, and accomplish vast amounts of policy change.
Progressive elites have a clear preference for the first. But Harris seems to be at least cracking open door No. 2.
In short order, she has repudiated most of the left-wing commitments she made in her shambolic 2020 campaign and proudly resuscitated her identity as a prosecutor. The advertisements she is running lean heavily on the border-enforcement deal that Senate Republicans and Democrats negotiated and that Trump undermined in the hopes of keeping the problem alive as an election issue. In four years, “Kamala is a cop!” has gone from slur to tagline.
This has already generated rumblings of discontent from some progressive organizations. Immigrant-rights activists are still furious that Harris three years ago bluntly told asylum seekers, “Do not come.” Some abortion-rights activists have complained that Harris is promising legislation only to restore the protections that existed under Roe v. Wade, rather than going further to endorse even more sweeping abortion-rights laws. Environmental-justice activists in California are withholding their endorsement of Harris, as is Sanders. Anti-Israel protesters, even after she agreed to discuss their demands, interrupted her rally with loud chanting.
This is fine. No, better than fine. It’s good that Harris is pushing back against the groups whose incessant demands reduced her last campaign to a miserable, politically toxic husk.
What about “energizing the base”? That the base appears highly energized would be a serious understatement. Indeed, the ecstasy rippling through the Democratic Party’s base refutes the premise that the way to excite Democrats is to submit to the endless ratchet of rhetoric and policy demanded by the professional left. The moments in Harris’s stump speech that generate the most excitement from her audience are when she takes the fight to Trump. What the Democratic base wants more than anything is to win.
Democrats have a habit of spiraling into neurosis when contemplating the risks of a nonwhite or female nominee. It is certainly true that some potential Democratic voters have a harder time supporting a president who does not look like past presidents.
But Obama found a way to neutralize that problem. It was not by calling out racism. It involved a combination of espousing traditional American ideals, then allowing the radical fact of his novel identity to speak mostly for itself. Democratic voters are mostly excited at the prospect of electing a first. Harris doesn’t need to excite them by casting herself as a transformational president ushering in a new order.
Indeed, she has, like Obama, affirmed the American ideal of individual initiative. (“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.”) She is not claiming to have created a new paradigm that departs from decades of experience. She ends her speeches by praising freedom, opportunity, and the promise of America. Most actual Democratic voters always liked this kind of patriotic rhetoric.
Her course is far from certain. After floating plans to nominate one of the most moderate Democratic governors, like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Harris instead chose Tim Walz, one of the most liberal. Walz has delighted Democratic partisans with his call for progressive values and punchy smackdowns of Republicans (“weird”). He represents the liberal hope that Democrats can win over moderate and Republican-leaning voters with pure personal style — a small-town white guy, football coach, veteran — without having to affirm values or ideas that might appeal to those voters. That is the path of least resistance for Democrats, but it leads toward a coin-flip election. A safe victory will require more.
We should not underestimate the challenge facing Harris. She is digging out of two deep holes: the record of left-wing position-taking from her first campaign and the unpopular record of the administration she served with. Republicans will do their mightiest to paint her as an out-of-touch liberal. Fortunately for Democrats, the response to such an attack has been sitting right in front of them all along.
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