In the days since he struck a deal to avoid a national default, President Biden has steadfastly refused to brag about what he got as part of the deal.
“Why would Biden say before the vote what a good deal it is?” he asked reporters at one point, referring to himself in the third person. “Do you think that’s going to help me make it? No. That’s why you don’t negotiate very well.’
The president calculated that the more he bragged that the deal was good for his side, the more he would incite the Republicans on the other side, jeopardizing the chances of getting the deal through the narrowly divided House. His reticence was in stark contrast to his negotiating partner, Chairman Kevin McCarthy, who has been sweeping the Capitol in recent days, claiming the deal was a “historic” victory for fiscal conservatives.
While Mr. Biden knew this would aggravate the progressives in his own party, he gambled that he could keep enough of them in line without publicly beating the chest and thought it was more important to let Mr. McCarthy claim victory to counter an uprising. the hard right that could jeopardize his speakership. Indeed, in private post-deal briefings, White House officials told Democratic allies they thought they got a good deal, but urged their deputies not to say so publicly, lest the delicate balance be upset .
The strategy paid off with a strong bipartisan vote by the House on Wednesday night approving the deal, which suspends the debt ceiling while imposing spending restrictions for the next two years. The Senate followed suit with approval of the bill late Thursday, also with bipartisan support.
The president’s approach to the negotiations — and especially the aftermath — reflects half a century of negotiation in Washington. When someone has been on the court as long as Mr. Biden, resisting the temptation to jab the ball and claim victory can be critical to actually securing victory. From the beginning of Mr. McCarthy’s clash with Republicans, Mr. Biden has followed instincts developed through long, hard, and sometimes painful experiences.
Some of his fellow Democrats complained that Mr Biden’s measured coverage — “it’s a bipartisan deal,” he would say when asked who prevailed on the compromise — caused Republicans to dominate the conversation. In their view, Mr Biden was too eager to secure a deal, even at the cost of policy concessions they found anathema, and too passive in defending the pact after he signed it.
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists globally – why are we here negotiating with the economic terrorists who are the Republican Party?” New York Democrat Representative Jamaal Bowman told reporters.
The who-won debate now raging in Washington could set the story for both sides as they navigate this new era of divided government. Republicans want to take credit for putting a growing federal government on a diet, while Democrats want to tell their supporters they have protected important progressive priorities.
Ultimately, the deal that Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy brokered was a watered-down version of the original proposals on the table. Mr Biden won no Democratic initiatives as part of the deal — no new taxes on the wealthy or cuts on prescription drugs, for example — but he managed to curb the far-reaching ambitions of conservatives who wanted to cut spending for the next decade and some of the president’s major achievements of his first two years in office.
The spending cuts are only for the next two years instead of the 10 years that Republicans are aiming for and result in less than half of the cuts they wanted. The job requirements eventually added to social safety net programs were more modest than originally envisioned and did not apply to Medicaid at all, as Republicans insisted. While some food aid recipients ages 50 to 54 will now face job requirements, many others who are veterans or homeless will be excluded for the first time in what the Congressional Budget Office estimated as a net wash when it comes to the total.
Republicans’ efforts to cancel clean energy investments and block student loan forgiveness were pushed out of the final deal, and they had to settle for cutting $20 billion from Mr Biden’s $80 billion plan to bolster the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to crack down on wealthy tax evaders rather than cancel them altogether.
“As a purely political calculation, the #DebtCeilingAgreement could have been worse,” Representative Ro Khanna, a prominent California-based progressive Democrat, said. wrote on Twitter before voting against the deal. “But this isn’t about politics, it’s about people.”
Mr Biden’s approach was decidedly old-fashioned in a new era. As much as Mr. McCarthy attacked him for waiting 97 days to talk about the dispute, the president believed there was no point in rushing into extended talks since no major appointments are made in Washington until a deadline approaches with catastrophic consequences if the two sides don’t come together.
While he initially insisted that the debt ceiling was “non-negotiable”, Mr Biden eventually abandoned that principle to do exactly what he said he would not do. He barely maintained the fiction that negotiating austerity was not negotiating the debt ceiling, a difference that few if any saw. When it was pointed out to him at some point this week, he finally shrugged and said, “Can you think of an alternative?”
Some in his party could — they wanted him to claim the power to override the debt ceiling, citing the 14th Amendment, which states that the federal government’s “validity of the national debt” “shall not be questioned.” But Mr Biden is an institutionalist, and while he said he agreed with the interpretation that the amendment gave him such untried authority, he was hesitant to argue it at this point, reasoning that it would hold up in court. be challenged and may still result in a default. during lengthy litigation.
Many others in both parties have rushed to the television cameras in recent days to comment on the significance of the agreement and the effects it would have on politics or policy, but Mr. Biden positioned himself as the quiet man in the capital, the mature leader he hopes voters will favor in next year’s election. The president occasionally engaged in Republican bashing when it seemed strategically useful, But he felt little need to just jump into the public position struggle, either before or after the deal was made.
Even as his allies and even his own White House made inflammatory statements, Mr. Biden acted like the person who was there before. Because of course he has. Many times. At one point during the final stages of the talks, with both sides throwing public grenades at each other while quietly narrowing down their differences, Mr. Biden advised reporters not to pay so much attention. It was all part of the process, he said.
“This is happening in stages,” he said. “I’ve been in these negotiations before.” He laid it out back and forth, with negotiators meeting and then reporting to their leaders. “What happens is that the first encounters were not so progressive. The second were. The third wash. And then what happens is they — the carriers go back to the principals and say, ‘This is what we’re thinking about.’ And then people come up with new claims.”
It would all work out in the end, he assured the Americans. And it did as far as he was concerned. Whatever anyone else may say.