Joe Biden kicks off a make-or-break week for his presidency and the Democratic Party’s wider fortunes Monday with a New Jersey speech pitching his troubled domestic spending package.
Biden first visited an elementary school ahead of giving the speech at a train maintenance depot in a Newark suburb, where he was set to push for a social spending bill worth a little less than $2 trillion and an infrastructure bill of around $1.2 trillion.
As he set out from his private home in Wilmington, Delaware where he’d spent the weekend, he told reporters he expected a deal this week.
He said that talks on Sunday with one of the main obstacles to agreement, moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, “went well.”
Democrats narrowly control Congress but have been feuding for weeks over the contents and scope of the social spending bill, with moderates forcing down the original $3.5 trillion price tag and left-leaning members retaliating by threatening to sink the otherwise popular infrastructure package.
The mess has left Biden scrambling to rescue his dream of emulating the great big-government presidents, like Franklin Roosevelt, and leaves Democrats at ever-growing risk of losing Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
The 78-year-old president hopes for a win in the next few days, buoying his credibility as he goes to the G20 summit in Rome on the weekend, followed by next week’s UN climate summit in Glasgow.
“It would be very, very positive to get it done before the trip,” he told reporters.
Another deadline of sorts is November 2, when the Democratic candidates for governor of New Jersey and especially Virginia face difficult elections.
Popular former president Barack Obama has already campaigned in both states and Biden is set to follow Monday’s New Jersey trip with a visit to Virginia on Tuesday.
However, analysts say that if the Democrats in Congress fail to produce the long-delayed spending bills by then, Biden’s endorsement and Democratic enthusiasm in general could fall flat, giving Republican opponents a momentum-changing victory.
In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy has seen his 26 point lead over the Republican challenger drop to six points.
The alarm bells are even louder in Virginia, a state Biden won easily in his election a year ago against Trump.
There, the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, is in a dead heat with Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin and Biden’s own popularity ratings are tanking.
– Almost there? –
Democratic Party leaders have been ramping up predictions of legislative success for a week. On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “we’re almost there.”
However, her caveat that “just the language of it” still needed resolving did not exactly answer lingering doubts over the Democrats’ ability to end their wrangling.
Some of the most complex negotiations have been over how to pay for the spending, with Biden reluctantly conceding he will need to abandon his push for higher corporate taxes. A novel tax on ultra-wealthy individuals is being discussed.
At the same time, slashing the wish list to around half of the original $3.5 trillion has triggered fierce turf battles over programs and whether to cut items out entirely or simply to provide less funding.
Among the big items that Biden has agreed to lose is his passionate drive for free community college — an idea given impetus by his wife, Jill, who teaches English at a community college in Virginia.
However, universal pre-kindergarten and childcare subsidies are expected to survive, as well as more money for state-backed healthcare. Up in the air still is the fate of proposals for spending on climate change mitigation.
