Proud to Be A Democrat

Publicly, Biden has made no secret of his displeasure with Trump’s handling of the disaster, from his personal conduct — Biden has said the delay in distributing relief checks in order to print Trump’s name on them “bothered me the most” — to the administration’s failure to ensure small businesses access to relief funds while state unemployment systems were overwhelmed. (Biden “was incredibly pissed off — furious” about it when his advisers described the problem to him, one told me.) On his calls, he has been most focused on fighting the disease and righting the economy. In his conversations with public-health experts like Kessler and former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, Biden usually hears up to half an hour of straight-ahead updates on disease projections, equipment distribution, and treatment research before he gets to his policy questions. In one of their talks, Kessler and Biden spent an hour on the phone discussing topics including “the intricacies of adenovirus vectors as vaccines, the detailed science. How do you make the virus? How’s it being tested, where it’s being tested,” Kessler said last month. “He wants me to engage in the scientific details because it helps him — he can take what we’re saying, and it helps him formulate a policy.” In another recent call, Biden’s briefers ran through the virus’s “R value” in each state and effective contact-tracing procedures.

Two months in, Biden’s daily questions are often oriented around understanding the landscape he would face next year. “We don’t know how things are going to be in January 2021, but in all likelihood there is still going to be enormous suffering in this country,” said Sullivan, who speaks with Biden regularly. “A lot of people will be knocked down and will have a hard time getting back up.” When discussing his policy options with his advisers, Biden often mentions his experience with the Ebola and H1N1 outbreaks as well as his work overseeing the “cancer moonshot” in his final year as VP. But it’s the memory of 2009 that looms largest for him. “His receptivity to a lot of this stems from direct experience with the last recession,” said former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray, whom Biden has consulted about economic proposals. Cordray, a close ally of Warren’s, and others agreed that Biden’s particular fixation, after seeing that significantly more stimulus money is passed, has been to ensure that it is properly administered.

And he’s been bracing to face a stubborn Congress that may feel it has already done enough. Biden has long touted his ability to work with Republicans, frequently to the exasperation of younger Democrats who see the last decade-plus as a tale of nonstop GOP obstruction. He’s still talking with allies about how to win Republicans over on emergency economic and public-health legislation. “He does have to be closely attentive to: How can we put together a bipartisan coalition to work toward recovery?” said Delaware senator Chris Coons, a close Biden ally. But based on his experience in 2009, Coons said, “he is concerned about the willingness of Republicans to work in a bipartisan way to power the public out of this.”

Recently, friends have noticed that Biden is talking less about this and more about policies that Mitch McConnell’s Senate GOP would be unlikely to go for no matter what — like new environmental investments and oversight. The crisis, Biden believes, has expanded “the state of what is possible, now that the American people have seen both the role of government and the role of frontline workers,” said Sullivan. “He believes he has a more compelling case to make that this is the agenda that needs to get passed.”…

And yet he’s grappling with the sudden disappearance of an environment in which he thrived. He occasionally sighs to friends about the lost ritual of campaigning: the hugs-on-the-rope-line retail politicking for which he’s best known and in which the most empathetic version of him is best understood as a human who has known great pain, a time when he can look voters in the eye and grieve with those wishing to share their burden with the man who lost his wife and 1-year-old daughter in a car crash at 29 and then his son to brain cancer in 2015. When he first went into lockdown, he asked aides to find ways to keep him interacting with the kinds of voters who’d show up to his events, so they set up a “virtual rope line” and — after he nearly gave out his cell number on CNN while discussing what it feels like to lose a loved one without being able to visit them — regular private conversations for him with everyday people affected by the virus, especially frontline workers and grieving family members. More than once since then, he has interrupted aides on calls when they’ve griped about the limitations of their confined environment, reminding them of medical workers’ stresses and dangers and of the Americans suddenly without a paycheck…

Another blow to the RoseBro deadenders, too:

sorry dead enders hoping recent developments would cause Bernie to un-suspend and jump back in https://t.co/kLJwAXacQL

— The Public Option is good actually (@gdigitalzsmooth) May 11, 2020