The invasion last week of Ukraine by Russia required fresh drafts of US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Over the past week, the US perception of the world—and America’s place in it—has radically changed. No sane person would have wished for this opportunity to reset the Biden presidency, but it’s such a moment nonetheless. Biden must convey the necessary sense of gravity and common purpose, and begin to fix some of the political mistakes he has made in his first year in the White House.
Biden’s encompassing error was to take sides in a cultural civil war that has divided America and blinded it to its most pressing national interests. Russia’s assault on Ukraine shows that the world is still a dangerous place. It proves how badly the US can harm itself and others by believing otherwise. And it demonstrates that a strong and self-confident America—which means a sufficiently united America—is a national-security imperative.
Biden was nominated and elected as a pragmatic, deal-making centrist. He has not been that. In office, he chose to marry unbounded domestic-policy ambitions to a social-justice narrative that the median voter simply doesn’t accept—a formula for division and paralysis, and for his own collapsing support.
His reinvention didn’t just call his credibility into question; it also supported alternative theories, even more threatening to his ability to lead. Perhaps he simply forgot what he used to be. Or maybe he was captured by the hard left of the Democratic Party and found himself trapped. For years, Biden has been known for gaffes and confusion. When questioned, he often retreats to prickly defensiveness. This too suggests he’s not in command.
Linking proposals like Build Back Better to the hard left’s radical critique of American capitalism had another big drawback: It made compromise look like defeat. To the true believer, incremental progress is worse than none, because it risks stabilizing an unacceptable state of affairs. The White House could have celebrated successes such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill and denounced those in the party who called it a sell-out. It did the first without conviction and the second not at all, further entrenching divisive politics.
On the issue of higher inflation, the US president has moved from saying it was expected and would be temporary to blaming it on the greed of American businesses and proposing more regulation and spending as remedies. Again, he defaulted to an anti-capitalist narrative. It would be better for the economy, and better politics, for Biden to say what’s true: that with hindsight, it’s clear the fiscal stimulus in the American Rescue Plan was too big, but that erring on the other side would have been worse; that inflation will come down as supply-side blockages ease; and that the US Federal Reserve is on the case.
On other elements of the cultural-left prospectus, such as defunding the police, defeating Caucasian supremacy, and empowering teachers’ unions over parents, Biden has wavered. He hasn’t voiced outright support for the left’s positions, but neither has he allied with the median voter. His speech in Atlanta on voting rights cast critics of Democrat proposals as bigots. His spending proposals are packed with accommodations for unions, with teachers’ unions a particular favourite.
He was handed an easy opportunity to distance himself from the more toxic varieties of the hard left’s value system when parents in impeccably blue San Francisco voted earlier this month by enormous margins to sack three extremists from their school board. This was the board that kept schools closed despite parents’ wishes and occupied its time by planning to rename schools named for problematic figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein. While San Francisco’s progressive mayor sided with the aggrieved parents, the White House vacillated.
Russia’s waging of war in Europe is in a somewhat more serious category of threat than the cultural left’s nonsense in San Francisco. The assault on Ukraine doesn’t just give Biden another chance to reinvent his presidency; it also makes the need for that reinvention indisputable. Starting now, he should do what he promised, and try to bring the country together around widely shared goals.
Even if he fails, he and America’s Democrats still retain a huge advantage heading into mid-term elections, and especially 2024: Donald Trump. The bewildered median voter would then have a difficult choice: Republicans in thrall to a detestable leader, or Democrats in thrall to a has-been ideology. Biden could make things a lot easier for that voter by recasting his presidency and helping his party and the country come to their senses.
Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics, finance and politics.
