Joe Biden is the Right Person for the Job

Biden’s experience, knowledge and connections will rebuild the Federal Government.

If you ever wanted a government job, get your resume ready. If Joe Biden becomes president in 2021 he’s going to need a lot of help. Job one will be to make the actual government an actual functioning government again. He’s going to need an A Team to get the job done.

Good thing he’s done it before.

In 2008, Barack Obama chose Joe Biden to be his Vice President. In a canny move, once in office, President Obama chose Rahm Emanuel, to be his Chief of Staff. Emmanuel, was, at the time,the Chair of the House Democratic Caucus, in the House of Representatives. Obama, it seems, deliberately chose two then powerful members of the Congress, one from the Senate, Biden, and one from the House, Emanuel, to team with him to work with the Congress. Not least because America was in a precarious position, at home and abroad.

This is the kind of politics at which Joe Biden excels. People and proximity and negotiations: team play at the highest level. Campaigns are the opposite of the sausage-making, but in the room where the sausage is made is where Biden has spent the bulk of his career.

It turned out to be a good choice for Barack Obama as the 111th Congress was one of the most productive Congresses in a long time. From the Recovery and Reinvestment act, which pulled the entire economy back from the brink of collapse to the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act to the ACA (what is now known as Obamacare), and with many initiatives in between, including the wildly successful cash for clunkers, the Dodd-Frank act and the ultimate repeal of ‘don’t ask don’t tell,’ the 111th Congress worked hand in glove with the Obama administration — that is to say with Obama, Biden and Emanuel — to get things done.

You don’t have to agree with every piece of legislation, or even any of them, to stand in awe of the sheer amount of work done in one session. And if you lament the compromises made, you can at least acknowledge the general movement in the progressive direction.

By way of contrast, the 111th Congress passed more, and more substantial, legislation than all the Congresses since then. This is hardly surprising as Mitch McConnell declared his intent to do nothing in the hopes of first, making Obama a one term president and, secondly, block Obama out of sheer pique, when he, McConnell, failed at the first goal.

In fact, a review of the 112th, 113th, 114th, 115th and the present, 116th, Congress comprises many re-authorizations, continuing resolutions averting government shutdowns, the almost complete stalling of nearly every one of Obama’s judicial nominees and one massive tax-cut for the wealthy. It would be an insult to the historical do-nothing Congresses of the past to call the Republican led Congresses of these sessions do-nothing: Brain dead and festering derelict would be closer to the mark.

While the Congress was busy just standing there, doing nothing, the Trump administration, for the last three and a half years, has been actively working against the government. Under the tryptich of horrors that is Trump’s feckless incuriosity, his yes-men incompetents with their own agendas and the absurdist paranoia about a ‘deep state’ conspiracy, we’ve seen critical and once-robust institutions like the State and Justice Departments hollowed out of any personnel of substance. Left to wither and in the hopes they die, these institutions have been crippled by a malign neglect.

But the sad fate of the Justice and State departments is one that might be wished upon the present EPA, which is now run by a former coal industry lobbyist, and the Treasury Department, which is run by a former Goldman Sachs banker and man who bought up about-to-foreclose mortgages IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS of 2008. A man who profits off other peoples pain. It’s no stretch to surmise that, at least as regards the EPA and the Treasury Department, each is now doing the opposite of the job for which they were created.

This is the world that Joe Biden will inherit on January 20, 2021, if he wins the election. The first step in restoration to sanity will be to rebuild the government, in some places from the ground up, and re-populate the diminished and demoralized ranks of the various departments, long neglected or even those inverted in purpose. To do that, he’ll have to built a team capable of doing that work at that level.

This is not at all disimilar to the position that Obama and Biden found themselves in 2009. The Bush Administrations drastically ill-advised invasion of Iraq, Dick Cheneys underhanded machinations, and Wall Street as epicenter of the global crisis, had succeeded only in making the United States of America deeply unpopular with the entire remainder of the worlds inhabitants. The State Department, once again, had to be rebuilt and, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, the relationships with almost every other country had to be repaired and remade.

It was in this act of repair, and the phenomenally good job she did, that Hillary Clinton earned the enmity of Stalin’s mini-me, Vladimir Putin.

In a career that stretches over forty-seven years, Joe Biden has worked teams, has made a lot of contacts, has a lot of experience with putting people who matter together with the jobs that matter, and, perhaps most importantly, has done it before.

He can put together the A-Team that is needed here.

© Petr Swedock 2020