Picking a Fight

Previously on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, I suggested that Biden should take a page from Harry Truman’s famous re-election campaign and run against the inaction of a Do-Nothing Congress.

Well, in his surprisingly fiery State of the Union address this week, Biden seemed to do exactly that.

During the speech, he took a lot of prepared shots at Trump, whom he repeatedly referenced as “my predecessor,” but he also went off script several times to spar aggressively — and happily! — with the congressional Republicans arrayed before him. He took their boos and their taunts, and turned them around to his advantage.

But more than that, he pulled the same trick that the poker-playing Truman did in the 1948 campaign — he called congressional Republicans’ bluff.

In Truman’s case, he used his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to call Congress back into an emergency session. At their own convention, the Republicans had just passed a platform promising that they would act on rising prices and a serious housing crisis if they won. Truman basically said, why wait? If you believe in those things, do it now.

Liberals, who had long been fretting that Truman wasn’t up to the task and frantically searching for someone to replace him, were suddenly excited about Truman again. As TRB of the New Republic noted, “it was fun to see the scrappy little cuss come out of his corner fighting, not trying to use big words, but being himself and saying a lot of honest things.”

After the special session of Congress got nowhere, Truman hit the road in an unusually energetic campaign. He trashed congressional Republicans as “Wall Street reactionaries “bloodsuckers,” and “gluttons of privilege.”  The Republican leaders in Congress, he said, were “tools of the most reactionary elements” who would “skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed.”  Making the election about more than him or his opponent, he told audiences “if you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you’re a bigger bunch of suckers than they think you are.”

And of course, it worked.

Biden basically launched the same sort of challenge in his State of the Union. In his case, he called the Republican bluff on their perennial campaign issue of the border. He pointed out that Congress had worked out a fairly conservative bill that would have addressed most of the things Republicans claim they want — an argument that was really helped by one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Republican Sen. Jim Lankford of Oklahoma, seen mouthing “that’s true” as the president described it — but that they had folded under pressure from Trump to deny Biden a win on the issue.

Biden called them out:

I believe that given the opportunity, for a majority in the House and Senate would endorse the bill as well — a majority right now. But unfortunately, politics have derailed this bill so far.

I’m told my predecessor called members of Congress and the Senate to demand they block the bill. He feels, political win — he viewed it would be a political win for me and a political loser for him. It’s not about him. It’s not about me. I’d be a winner, not really.

…

Folks, I would respectfully suggest my Republican friends owe it to the American people: Get this bill done. We need to act now.

And if my predecessor is watching instead of playing politics and pressuring members of Congress to block the bill, join me in telling the Congress to pass it.

Now, I know better than to predict the future in politics, but given the abysmal track record of this Congress, I’d say the odds are good that the next steps follow the Truman script — the GOP House will refuse to do anything, and Biden can double down on the attacks while making himself seem like the reasonable one.

It’s a winning approach, and one that would work well for this particular president in this particular moment.

Keep on being a scrappy little cuss, Mr. President. It looks good on you.