Timing has not been President Joe Biden’s strong suit lately. Hours after he declared in an interview released Wednesday that he would consider ending his campaign if doctors told him he had “some medical issue,” the White House announced he had tested positive for Covid. The only reason his exit is even being discussed is his performance in the first debate with former President Donald Trump. It was his team’s decision to hold the abnormally early faceoff before the Democratic National Convention, leaving enough time for second thoughts about his candidacy to percolate.
Such has been the case for Biden the last several weeks, as forces outside his direct control have overshadowed his attempts to steady his wavering campaign.
Among the fears his performance sparked is whether, as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem argued, his campaign has been too focused being anti-Trump rather than presenting a second-term policy agenda. With that in mind, it makes sense that Biden finally has begun to roll out his plans for what he’ll do if he wins. You’d be forgiven if you missed the announcement for his plan for the first 100 days of his second term. It came during a Friday night event in Detroit — the day before the failed assassination attempt on Trump. Such has been the case for Biden the last several weeks, as forces outside his direct control have overshadowed his attempts to steady his wavering campaign.
Biden’s pitch for his second term included some familiar agenda items, unfinished business from when the Democrats held both houses of Congress in his first two years. He pledged that the first bill he sends Congress will be to “restore Roe v. Wade to make it the law of the land.” Biden also said that he’d sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, both of which ran into a Republican filibuster when last presented to the Senate in 2022.
Other portions of his proposed plans would expand or codify actions his administration has already taken. Last month, Vice President Kamala Harris and Lena Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, announced a new rule that would ban medical debt from being included in credit reports. Biden said on Friday that he would go after medical debt writ large if he returned to the White House, drawing applause from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Likewise, he vowed to cap insulin costs at $35 per month for all Americans with diabetes, the same way the the Inflation Reduction Act did for Medicare enrollees.
But there were some new announcements in his speech that will hopefully get more attention over the coming months. One was a pledge to finally tackle the cost of housing, a crisis that affects Americans across the country. Biden told the crowd that he’d advocate a plan to “build 2 million housing units and cap rent increases at 5% a year so corporate landlords can no longer gouge everyone like they’re doing.”
Since then, his administration has already rolled out details on his new housing plan in hopes of getting traction on the issue ahead of November. And while it wasn’t mentioned in his Friday address, we’ve also learned that that he’s developing a proposal to reform the Supreme Court, a major shift for him to address Democrats’ angst over the deeply conservative court and the ethics scandals circling several of the justices.
Instead, the question has become whether Biden would necessarily be the one to implement those policies if Trump loses.
On the one hand, this is exactly what Zeeshan was calling for in his piece, offering up a substantive, positive agenda to counter Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next GOP president’s agenda. It also reportedly comes after progressives like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., threw Biden a political lifeline following the initial calls for him to step aside. Looking down ballot, announcing these policies now also gives Democrats running for Congress items to sell to their voters, as many of them would require retaking the House and retaining the Senate.
The immediate question, though, isn’t whether these are good policies — which they are, offering up a clear difference for Americans about what a Democratic president will do compared to Trump. For that matter, it’s not even about whether it will move the needle for undecided voters ahead of this fall. That’s a question that’s more up in the air, as a Gallup poll from last month showed that more independents surveyed said that Biden is too liberal than thought Trump is too conservative.
Instead, the question has become whether Biden would necessarily be the one to implement those policies next year. While the intense scrutiny he’s faced since the debate has been a bit much at times, it was still eyebrow raising when he mangled his housing policy when speaking at the NAACP earlier this week. And after a brief respite in the aftermath of this weekend’s shooting, the tide against him remaining in the race has continued to pummel him. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., became the most prominent Democrat to publicly call for Biden to drop out in favor of another candidate. Hours later, the White House announced that he has Covid, taking him off the campaign trail.
Curiously, Biden’s inability to sell these second-term policies on the stump for the next few days highlights how few of them are uniquely associated with Biden. Much of what’s been announced could easily be the position of any Democrat running for president in 2024. Without a competitive primary season to distinguish between the alternative candidates whose names have been floated, the debate has been over who voters will believe is best equipped to win against Trump. Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if Biden had started making his case earlier — but, again, timing is everything here.