Can Fine Print Trump Bombast?

Biden bets yes

There’s an old piece of political wisdom attributed to the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Soaring rhetoric on the stump may get you elected, but effectiveness once in office is more about parsing dependent clauses. 

Well, today we are coining a corollary (with a desperate attempt at matching Cuomo’s alliteration): “Demagoguery might dominate headlines, but details define history.”

In the aftermath of the negotiations to avoid defaulting on the national debt, reporting is emerging that allows us to unpack what took place behind the scenes. As we previously wrote, the deal is being seen overall as a major accomplishment for Biden. (And, more importantly, overall a good thing for the country.) How did it happen?

It is noteworthy that more Democrats voted for the bill in both the House and the Senate than Republicans, who created this false fiasco in the first place. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing recriminations from a GOP caucus that thinks he got rolled by the White House. There are some Democrats who complain that Biden gave away too much. But most Democrats are wondering how terms that would have seemed unreasonably rosy a few weeks ago turned into the language Biden signed into law. 

“Biden’s Debt-Deal Strategy: Win in the Fine Print” is today’s New York Times headline. Describing the approaches of the major players in the negotiations, particularly from the White House side, reporter Jim Tankersley concludes:

In pursuit of an agreement, the Biden team was willing to give Republicans victory after victory on political talking points, which they realized Mr. McCarthy needed to sell the bill to his conference. They let Mr. McCarthy’s team claim in the end that the deal included deep spending cuts, huge clawbacks of unspent federal coronavirus relief money and stringent work requirements for recipients of federal aid.

But in the details of the text and the many side deals that accompanied it, the Biden team wanted to win on substance. With one large exception — a $20 billion cut in enforcement funding for the Internal Revenue Service — they believe they did.

The way administration officials see it, the full final agreement’s spending cuts are nothing worse than they would have expected in regular appropriations bills passed by a divided Congress.

“Political talking points” on the one hand and the “details of the text” on the other. Could there be a more accurate juxtaposition of the current state of the two major American political parties and their national leadership?

There was a time in Washington, not too long ago, when each party contained a rich blend of sloganeers and technocrats. Both sides of the aisle had their share of bombast; both also knew how to horse trade their way to a backroom deal. 

But today, Republican politics is characterized by exaggerated performance and petty rants personified by the previous president. It’s a mindset where you “win” with Fox News diatribes, set priorities through the divisive mantras of MAGA rallies, and quote unhinged conspiracy theories as evidence. 

Sadly, on the national level and in many states, it is a party that has lost any real connection to coherent policy other than “owning the libs.” So it’s all about grievances and gerrymandering, stacking the courts and suing Disney. 

As for the budget deficit, there was a time when Republicans wanted to gut entitlement programs. That wasn’t popular, but at least it was a position. Trump couldn’t care less about it, probably because his political instincts told him that it was a losing proposition. And any threat to Social Security and Medicare was off the table before this negotiation even started, in part because of Biden’s deft performance in his State of the Union address when he called out the GOP position. 

In the end, you might be left to wonder what Republicans were even negotiating this time around. Sure, they wanted spending cuts, because that’s just their “conservative” instinct. But really they wanted Biden to lose and Democrats to lose, even if that meant a loss for the American public (including their own GOP voters). 

When you consider the issues that animate the far right and most of the candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination, it is difficult to drill down to anything that qualifies as an actual policy position. There is immigration, but that’s treated as an existential threat perfect for ratcheting up divisiveness as opposed to a complicated economic, social, and moral issue. Think a photo-op of a so-called wall as a smoke screen for actual action. There’s a fear of crime, which leads to endless cell phone footage of supposedly scary people running rampant, but that doesn’t deal with complicated causes or data that points to a more nuanced reality. 

To be sure, crime and immigration are serious issues on which many Democratic politicians struggle for answers. But there is no sense that these problems will be seriously addressed with legislation by Republicans. It’s all heated rhetoric meant to scare the base into going to the polls. Same for the lies about stolen elections, nonsensical conspiracy theories around Anthony Fauci, questioning Biden’s mental acuity, and on and on. 

None of this noise is good for the country or the world. We would benefit from having politicians from a variety of viewpoints and backgrounds wrestling with the details of governance. No political party or point of view has a monopoly on wisdom. We can all learn from others. But running a country effectively means dealing in facts. It means getting into the weeds. It means understanding how to fashion the fine print. 

President Biden has his weaknesses and makes his mistakes. But he has just demonstrated that at least he understands an important lesson of life in general and politics in particular: that you can be winning when many people say you are losing — if you are willing to cede what’s trending on Twitter for what's tucked in the text.

This effort is supported by the Steady community. If you aren’t already a member, please consider subscribing.