Biden, 2020's Warren G Harding

Status Quo Joe by Nancy Ohanian

Before Biden officially announced, I was developing a theory about how he would be the Warren G. Harding of the election cycle. Harding-- once extremely popular, is routinely considered one of the 3 worst presidents in history by presidential scholars-- ran on a platform that could be boiled down to "A Return To Normalcy." And, sure enough, Status Quo Joe, is living up to the theory.

What his campaign represents is the status quo ante-- the normalcy of the time before Trump... when Obama (and Biden, more or less) were inadvertently laying the ground for Trump with their centrist agenda. Biden wants to embrace that agenda. Just Thursday, Biden did an interview for Iowa Starting Line, an interview his handlers probably wish he had never sat for. Biden-- who PolitiFact has shown to be a congenital liar nearly as untethered to truthfulness as Trump-- started off by whining about the campaign and insisting it should be about his actual researchable record but about his say-whatever-you-think-the-audience-wants-to-hear promises. "We’re supposed to be talking about and competing about what we’re going to do about the future. Anybody can go back and pitch something about somebody’s past, out of context. Like, who in God’s name knows anything about busing from your generation?... My decision was made that I’m not going to go back and argue with people about the past. What do you want to do now? I hope we move that way and continue to talk about the future."

Then he went on to try to persuade... himself? someone else? that his great relationships with Senate Republicans will make the country a better place. Was he not milking those relationships while the Senate was screwing over the Obama-Biden administration? No one asked. He seems to have forgotten that Merrick Garland was another of many, many, many exampled of the Obama administration moving right to compromise with the Republicans, who would then just move the goal posts further and further right. Garland was more like a mainstream Republican nominee than a Democratic nominee. Obama, offered him as a compromise to replace Scalia-- a conservative judge Republicans liked a lot, even more than Democrats did. But now Biden is saying he'd nominate him again if he had the chance-- the ultimate in an utterly clueless status quo ante vision.

And with sizable majorities of Americans favoring raising taxes on the wealthy so that they start paying their fair share, where does Biden go? Back to the already way too low rates under Obama. Forget AOC's proposal for a top marginal rate of 70%... Biden told Chris Cuomo on CNN that he'd like to raise the top rate to 39.5% and take the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

Whatever the question or the topic, State Quo Joe wants to take it back to the way it was under Obama. Medicare-For-All makes no sense to him-- just tweaking an entirely inadequate Obamacare system that was always just a weak incremental first step towards universal healthcare anyway.

Warren G. Harding ran on many of the same premises that make, at least to pundits, a "compelling" case for Biden. Harding's 1920 campaign theme was "A Return to Normalcy," a reference to what life was like before the disruption of the Great War (World War I). Here's how Harding made his case: "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." As expected, Biden is making a similar case based post-Trumpist disruption to the status quo.

Harding was elected in 1920 and a series of scandals-- both political (Tea Pot Dome being the worst pre-Trump scandal of the 20th Century) and personal (mistresses galore). He appointed pedatory bankster Andrew Mellon Treasury Secretary and Mellon immediately set out to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations. Like Trump, Harding was a moron who didn't understand policy and, also like Trump, had the attention span of a gnat. He explained to a friend that "I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side, and they seem right, and then-- God!-- I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right." Eventually Harding appeared before the Senate himself and asked them to abolish the Excess Profits Tax in corporations while not giving a bonus to soldiers who fought in WWI. Congress passed the veterans bonus bill anyway but Harding vetoed it and his veto was narrowly sustained. His tariff bill was a feeding frenzy for corrupt lobbyists and equally corrupt politicians and eventually a disaster in international trade. At Mellon's insistence, Harding proposed bringing down the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 25%. And, also like Trump, Harding was an anti-union fanatic and pushed massive deregulation of business. His economic policies caused a quickie boost for the economy that eventually led to the Great Depression.

The 1922 midterms were a disaster for the GOP because of Harding's pro-business/pro-rich people policies. The Republicans lost a mind-boggling 82 seats in the House and 8 Senate seats. He died (age 57) a few months later. If Biden is elected I'll predict right now that he will be an even worse, though similar, president than Harding.