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Biden's State of the Union address: 3 takeaways
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares his perspective on how the State of the Union address.
Today's topic is: Three takeaways from last night's State of the Union address.
My first takeaway is that Biden hasn't backed down at all from his aggressive and very progressive agenda, listing off a series of policies that excited Democrats, but are really non-starters with Republicans, from gun control to immigration reform. None of this is going to happen because Biden lacks the votes in the House and definitely in the Senate. And the parts that do happen are really up to the whims of one man, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin who signaled today that he was willing to work with the White House on parts of Biden's agenda, including drug price reform, money for decarbonization, reforming the tax code, and deficit reduction. And it's really up to Democrats to decide if that would be enough for them.
The second takeaway is that Biden's guests, as always, tell a story. He featured in the First Lady's box, a steel worker, a diabetes advocate, a COVID nurse, a war widow, a Native American. The two that were most interesting to me, however, was one the CEO of Intel, the semiconductor company, and two, the whistleblower from Facebook. The Intel CEO was used to tell a story to advocate for the passage of a package of semiconductor subsidies which should get done later this year as part of anti-China competition bill that has bipartisan support.
The Facebook whistleblower is a woman who released a bunch of documents to Congress that talks about the harm of social media to kids and how the companies know that it's doing harm. And Biden used her as a platform to talk about support for more mental health funding and strengthening privacy protections for kids, something that could happen on a bipartisan basis if they find the right way to do it.
My final takeaway is that while Biden spent a lot of time rallying support for the financial war he's waging against Russia, he didn't spend a lot of time preparing Americans for the eventual cost of that war. The entire first part of his speech was a forceful call to arms to help Ukraine. And this financial war that Biden is waging is popular for now, but these actions are going to have a price for Americans in terms of higher energy costs and potentially future supply chain snarls. And Russia could escalate the war both against Ukraine and broader against the West.
Biden didn't talk much about these potential costs, how long Americans are going to have to bear any burden that comes, or what he's going to do to mitigate them. And while the war is popular for now as these costs go on and the costs grow, this is going to be a political pain point for him in the future.
Grading President Biden's first 100 days; 2020 US Census helps Sun Belt states
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
How would you grade President Biden's performance in his first 100 days?
Well, Biden's done pretty well in this first 100 days. He's done a good job on what's the number one most important issue facing his administration and that's the coronavirus response. He hit his goal of 100 million vaccinations within the first month or so of his administration. And they increased that to 200 million vaccinations, which they hit on day 92. So that's a pretty successful start. They inherited a lot of that from President Trump to be fair. Operation Warp Speed set the US up for success and Biden delivered after he came into office. And of course, the second thing is his COVID relief package, which the US has taken advantage of a favorable funding environment to borrow trillions of dollars and get them into the hands of American small businesses and families and has really helped the economy through what has been a very bad year but could have been a lot worse if the government hadn't intervened. The bill has been very popular, and it set the stage for a follow on bill that Biden wants to deliver for big priorities for democrats later this year, potentially as much as $4 trillion in spending.
Less good are kind of the external challenges that he's been facing. He changed his mind on his refugee policy. He's got a major problem with a flood of immigrants at the southern border. That's really unsolvable. And there's been a rash of high-profile shootings that it's going to be really, really hard for the federal government to do anything about because of polarization and the lack of 60 votes in the Senate. So overall, I think you've got to give them a solid A, A- for his first 100 days and now is probably the time when it starts getting tougher as he starts planning even bigger long-term things.
Who are the winners and losers from the 2020 US census results?
Well, there's been a population shift over the last 10 years from kind of declining Rust Belt states to booming Sun Belt states. And you saw states like Texas, Arizona, Florida gain seats, but not as many as expected. Texas was thought to get three, but they only got two. California lost a seat for the first time ever. And because of this, you're going to see a steady shift of power to these southern Sun Belt states, which are largely controlled by Republicans who will, again, as they did in 2010, have the advantage in the redistricting process that will determine who controls Congress, gives them an edge up in the 2022 midterm elections, and really puts the Democrats' are already very thin majority in peril.
Hard Numbers: Biden's first 100 days in office
6 trillion: President Biden has so far proposed a whopping $6 trillion in new government spending, the bulk of which would go to his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan (his COVID relief bill has already passed). While the Biden administration says that tax hikes for wealthier Americans will cover the bill, Republicans say the agenda is too costly.
5: In response to several Republican-dominated states restricting the rights of transgender youth, the Biden administration has issued five executive orders focused specifically on strengthening LGBTQ rights, according to the Center for American Progress.
85: Around 85 percent of Americans who tuned into President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress this week approved of his message, and most felt optimism about the direction of the country, according to a CBS poll. Just over half of those who watched (54 percent) identified as Democrats.
54: After his first 100 days in office, President Biden has a national approval rating of 54 percent. While this is well above Donald Trump's 42 percent approval rating during that same period, it falls short of all his predecessors dating back to 1974. In today's polarized America, US presidents can rarely count on support from members of the opposite party at all.
COVID explodes in India
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Welcome to your week. Quick Take for you. Thought I would talk today about India.
The epicenter today and for the foreseeable future of the coronavirus pandemic. We are seeing 350,000 cases a day and over 2,000 deaths. Those are surely massive undercounts for an incredibly poor and half rural population that has nowhere near the infrastructure or political will to engage in the data collection that you would need to get those numbers out. The presumption is the real numbers are five to 10 times that. The government is hoping that these cases and deaths will peak in mid-May, about a month away. This is, I mean in terms of the total path of the pandemic, this is by far the largest outbreak that we've seen since this started over a year ago.
Narendra Modi is taking it pretty hard politically in India, in part because back in January, when he was speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting, virtually, he basically declared victory over coronavirus, that India was one of the countries that had successfully controlled coronavirus. Obviously, seriously premature in that announcement. Lots of domestic blowback, lots of people calling for his resignation on social media, and the rest. Modi supporting mass campaign rallies. He was certainly wearing a mask all the way through, has certainly been very supportive of vaccines. But the inability and unwillingness of the Indian government to get ahead of this in terms of more quarantines and lockdowns, the economic cost would be massive for India. And allowing for these massive gatherings of humans, not just around election rallies, but specifically the Kumbh Mela, where you've got all of these, it's a religious ritual with 3 million people gathering, bathing in the Ganges River, massive super spreader events greater than anything we've seen in the world. And you know, that's clearly an indictment on his leadership.
Now, I want to be clear, I would not give Modi the same negative marks that I would for people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, or AMLO in Mexico, or Trump in the United States, because he hasn't been a denier of the vaccine, he hasn't been promoting false cures, hasn't been saying don't wear masks, he hasn't politicized the virus domestically the way that some of those other leaders have. People like the former President Magufuli in Tanzania, who died of COVID, still not admitted as such by their government. And also, the fact that India is incredibly poor, it's incredibly densely populated in urban centers. They have nowhere near the healthcare or testing infrastructure, never mind the United States, but even of a Brazil or a Mexico. And India was until very recently exporting vaccines around the world. They were part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I don't think that we should paint the same brush against Modi, that we are some of the world's leaders that have truly fallen down on this crisis. But still the size of India, the impact of all of these millions and millions of Indians that are coming down with COVID is going to lead to a lot more variants of coronavirus around the world, which requires more booster variants and very difficult for the companies to know how many they should make of which and apply them to which regions, and that will make the vaccines in turn, somewhat less effective. So it is a big problem.
And the United States, the most powerful economy, country in the world, needs to recognize that we have to do more. We've known that it was going badly in India for at least a month now. And the Indian government and the leaders of their vaccine institutes have been requesting, increasingly, alarmingly, support from the United States. Remember, India as a part of The Quad, they're supposed to be coordinating with us around vaccine export back when that was the thing, and in terms of not accepting, aligning with the Chinese in terms of help and support. The Indian government has leaned into that and now they are blaming the United States for not doing much, not exporting vaccines, not even having export of vaccine ingredients. There were export controls on all of those ingredients. And anyone that you talk to in this field would say that the US could have moved on this easily a month ago and it would have made a big difference on the ground to India.
Now, I am happy to say that over the last 48 hours, the US government, the National Security Council has announced that they are going to start providing those ingredients, medical professionals, and other assistance for the Indian government as quickly as possible. That is certainly welcome. But is it enough? It is certainly late and that is a problem. I think the United States needs to understand that coronavirus is not just a global disease, but we need a global immune system. And the focus, the extraordinary focus on the United States, as politically essential as that is, is not the appropriate epidemiological response. It's like saying, "Okay, well, we know that we've got a problem in the lungs and so we're going to treat the lungs and the lungs are great, but there's also a problem in the liver, there's a problem in the heart." And we have been completely ignoring that. But we're all one body. And indeed, humanity on the planet with the pandemic is all one body. And this is going to come back and affect us in the United States. There's no question.
So we need to take a more global view on this pandemic. The numbers that are coming out of India, and again, nowhere close to what the real numbers in India surely are right now. Hopefully we'll start to truly focus the mind on this issue in Washington, something that I am sure I will be talking a lot more about in coming weeks and months.
So that's a Quick Take from me today. I hope everyone is safe. In the United States, increasingly, don't have to avoid as many people, but in India you surely do. Talk soon.
Biden's first press conference reaffirms his working man approach
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Joe Biden gave the first press conference of his presidency today, a much-anticipated event that a lot of political reporters were pretty excited about, that didn't really move the needle on any messaging aspects of the administration.
He kind of stuck to the party line on the filibuster, saying that it's a relic of Jim Crow era. And clearly, you know, he's already said he supports eliminating it, but he's not going to push Congress to get it done because that's not really his job. That's their job.
On the border, he talked about sending Kamala Harris down to negotiate a solution with Mexico and other Central American countries so they can deal with the problem where it starts. And he kind of took credit for being a compassionate guy, that immigrants believe when they come here, he's going to take care of them, which is consistent with the administration's message so far. A group of Senate Republicans are headed down to the border today in order to make some political theater out of the surge in migrants that's happening down there, and this is going to be an increasing political problem for Biden going forward because of the fact his party is somewhat out of step with the mainstream American view on immigration.
On the vaccine, there was a little bit of news, that he thinks he's going to be able to accelerate the timeline that people can get the vaccination. However, for the most part, this is really a non-event. Biden has stayed out of the spotlight and he hasn't really dominated headlines the way his predecessor, former President Trump, did. This is a purposeful strategy, to kind of have a working man approach to the White House, not make the story about him, and in the meantime, accomplish an awful lot, which the Democrats are likely to do this year between a $1.9 trillion stimulus they've already passed, and what looks like it's going to be potentially a $3 trillion long-term infrastructure spending bill that likely gets done before the end of the year.
Dr. Fauci's pandemic prognosis
The country's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, joins Ian Bremmer to talk vaccines, school re-openings, and when—and how—the pandemic could finally come end. He was last on GZERO World just weeks before the pandemic hit in the fall of 2019 and he described at the time what kept him up at night: a "pandemic-like respiratory illness." This time, he'll talk about how closely that nightmare scenario foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic. He'll also offer some guidance about what public health measures vaccinated Americans should continue to take in the coming months (hint: masks stay on).
Podcast: Dr. Fauci's Pandemic Prognosis
Listen: The country's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, joins Ian Bremmer to talk vaccines, school re-openings, and when—and how—the pandemic could finally come end. He was last on GZERO World just weeks before the pandemic hit in the fall of 2019 and he described at the time what kept him up at night: a "pandemic-like respiratory illness." This time, he talks about how closely that nightmare scenario foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic. He also offers some guidance about what public health measures vaccinated Americans should continue to take in the coming months (hint: masks stay on).
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
Ted Cruz's vacation repercussions; Biden's bind on school reopening
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Why is everyone so interested in Ted Cruz's vacation?
Well, the junior Senator from Texas took a little trip down to Cancun with his family this week, which normally wouldn't be that big of a deal, except it was in the middle of historic snowstorm that froze the entire state, left millions without water or electricity.
While other prominent Texas politicians are out trying to help people get water, get access to food, get warm, Cruz took off for Cancun with his family. And this immediately broke on social media causing him to come home the next morning, under the excuse that he was just escorting them down there overnight. But Ted Cruz is officially Twitter's bad guy for the day, and this probably has lasting repercussions, forming popular opinion of him, while the rest of the state freezes.
What is the Biden administration doing to reopen the schools?
Well, the Biden administration is in a bit of a bind because they've been sending conflicting messages. Their CDC director said that it's probably safe for teachers to go back to the school, even without the vaccine. But their political operation has been a little bit more gun-shy in part because of their alliance with the US teachers' unions, who don't want to send their teachers back if there's even a remote possibility that they might get sick. Biden himself has been a little bit mixed in his messaging about when they want to get people back to school, but the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill that we expect to pass in the next several weeks, includes tens of billions of dollars for school reopenings, on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been spent in the CARES Act and the December relief bill. So, money is not the problem getting kids back in school right now. It's the willingness of families and the willingness of teachers to take the risk.