The Daily 202: Biden’s go-big agenda surfs a sea change in public attitudes

More than any other article, more than evanescent public opinion polls, more than chin-stroking analyses of President Biden’s personality, or of (Heaven help us) his political “brand,” Jeff’s piece seems to explain this moment.

In it, Jeff diagnoses “a reorientation on economic policy — on the left and on the right — that has transformed the political landscape” under former president Donald Trump as well as  Biden. The pandemic has accelerated a trend toward Americans as a whole worrying less about soaring deficits and the swelling national debt and more about how much government can help its citizens.

As Biden prepares for his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday and passes the symbolic 100-day mark of this presidency, and as the country appears to be clawing its way out of the pandemic, many Americans appear to want an active or even activist government.

And Biden appears to be delivering. He pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package and has introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure package, both of which stand to remake large swaths of the economy. The centerpiece of his speech appears to be a package of mostly popular benefits he’s calling the “American Families Plan,” a project with a $1.5 trillion price tag.        

It’s not clear to what degree the shift in attitudes explains Biden’s job-approval numbers, which sit just above 50 percent, or the support for his vast spending proposals.

In December 1995, one month before President Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over,” the pollsters asked “some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your view?” Just 32 percent of respondents agreed with “do more,” while 62 percent agreed government was overambitious.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll basically confirms the trend, though in less dramatic fashion. Yes, slightly more Americans (48 percent) favor a smaller government with fewer services than a larger government with more services (45 percent). But it’s the first time since 1988 that the “smaller” camp dipped under 50 percent, and it’s the biggest “larger” number since June 2008 — when the country was groping its way out of the financial crisis.

“The shift in the direction of a larger government with more services is due largely to changes among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, with 70 percent of this group today saying they want a larger government providing more services, up from 58 percent in 2012. Republicans’ views have not budged, with 79 percent preferring a smaller government now vs. 81 percent in 2012. (The question was not asked between 2012 and this poll.)”

As Democrats push for trillion-dollar proposals to remake swathes of the economy, Stein wrote, “Biden is in some ways the ideal messenger for their spending blitz. A septuagenarian who spent four decades in Congress, the president is hard to portray as a socialist or radical leftist — even as he advances some ambitious expansions of government spending, including a major new child tax benefit.”

A Gallup poll last month found 77 percent say they worry a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about it. But that was down from 87 percent in March 2011 — shortly after the “tea party” backlash against President Barack Obama’s policies helped Republicans recapture the House.

That hardly slowed Trump, who promised in his inaugural address his presidency would deliver for “the forgotten men and women of our country.”

Republicans barely mustered a peep of protest as Trump steered tens of billions of dollars to the agricultural sector to offset the economic pain from his trade war with China. And Trump’s top legislative achievement, the 2017 tax law, added an estimated $1.56 trillion to the national debt.

If, as then-vice president Dick Cheney reportedly insisted two decades ago, it’s true Ronald Reagan “proved deficits don’t matter,” then Trump absorbed the lesson and gave Republicans a refresher course during his four years in office. 

Of course, that comment from Cheney might have surprised Reagan, who said in his farewell address: “I’ve been asked if I have any regrets. Well, I do. The deficit is one.”

The first results of the 2020 Census are scheduled to drop today, Tara Bahrampour reports, after encountering multiple obstacles. “If the results are widely seen as flawed, it could cloud a decade of political reshuffling, federal spending, city planning, academic research, and private and public enterprise that rely on census data. The [Census Bureau] said it plans to release quality metrics the same day as the data release, which is scheduled for 3 p.m., in part to help allay concerns about problems the hurdles may have caused.”

The Supreme Court will hear a major new gun control case next term on carrying weapons outside the home. The National Rifle Association-backed challenge asks the court to declare there is a constitutional right to carry a weapon outside the home, Robert Barnes reports. “The court will hear the challenge to a century-old New York gun control law in the term that begins in October. It is considering a law that requires those who seek a permit to carry a concealed weapon show a special need for self-defense. It is similar to laws in Maryland, Massachusetts and elsewhere that the court in the past has declined to review. But the court’s new conservative majority has signaled it is more receptive to Second Amendment challenges.” 

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) formally launched his Senate bid this morning, becoming the first Democrat to enter the race to succeed retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) next year, John Wagner reports. Ryan, a 10-term congressman who briefly competed for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, pledged to champion the working class. Four Republicans have already announced plans to enter the Ohio Senate race. 

Former congressman Joe Cunningham (D) formally announced a 2022 bid for South Carolina governor this morning. Cunningham won an election in 2018 in a Palmetto State district long dominated by Republicans only to narrowly lose the seat two years later, Wagner reports. In his announcement video, “Cunningham took aim at incumbent South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) and shared plans to pursue policies such as expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage and overhauling policing.” 

• “In leaked audio, Iran’s foreign minister laments interference by Revolutionary Guard,” by Kareem Fahim: “The audio, which was released by the London-based Iran International news channel, came from a three-hour interview with the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, that the channel said was conducted in March. Taken together, Zarif’s unvarnished comments and the fact that the audio had leaked highlighted the sharpening public rivalries within Iran’s political circles, as Tehran engages with global powers in a fresh attempt to revive the nuclear deal, and as Iranian elections approach.”
• “Russian court suspends Navalny’s political headquarters while it considers banning his organizations,” by Robyn Dixon: “Russian prosecutors asked the court to ban three organizations associated with the jailed [opposition leader, Alexei] Navalny, in a hearing in which much of the case file was secret, the lawyers said. Navalny’s lawyers were given access to the prosecution file on the case only on the morning of the hearing. The suspension means that Navalny’s main political network in the country has been barred from operating ahead of parliamentary elections in September.”

• “The slander industry,” by the New York Times’s Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill: “To get slander removed, many people hire a ‘reputation management’ company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000. We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.”
• “The ease of tracking mobile phones of U.S. soldiers in hot spots,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau: “The U.S. government has built robust programs to track terrorists and criminals through warrantless access to commercial data. Many vendors now provide global location information from mobile phones to intelligence, military and law-enforcement organizations. But those same capabilities are available to U.S. adversaries.”
• “Young adults’ relocations are reshaping political geography,” by Associated Press’s Nicholas Riccardi and Mike Schneider: “They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.”

• “Four years after racking up big bills under Trump, the party’s strategy is becoming clear: Republicans are straining to revive their message of fiscal discipline now that Democrats are in charge,” Tony Romm and Yeganeh Torbati report.
• “The tensions were on display Thursday, as Senate Republicans unveiled [their] $568 billion infrastructure counteroffer,” our colleagues write. “In keeping with GOP orthodoxy, party lawmakers … excluded any tax increases to pay for the package, offering few specifics about their alternative idea — to rely on unspecified user fees and unused stimulus money — to cover the cost. The vague details suggested divisions within the GOP about the size and scope of the package.”
• “But Republican observers said the approach reflected a shrewd political calculation. Judd Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, said the proposal would be ‘dead on arrival’ if GOP lawmakers had offered more specificity about the ways they intend to finance infrastructure reforms. ‘I’ll be surprised if they reach an agreement,’ he said. ‘I just think they’re philosophically a long way apart.’”
• “The lack of specificity troubled tax experts, who said it was difficult to evaluate whether the plan could be paid for in this manner,” our colleagues write. “Senate Republicans, however, emphasized that it reflected a broader view among their conference that they needed to be more judicious about opening the federal purse.”

• That is according to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who told CNN’s “State of the Union” there’s been some “very encouraging” signs from the administration since Republicans presented their counter proposal last week.
• “Aides familiar with the Republican proposal point out it is meant to be an opening bid in a broader negotiation, not the final product. But $600 billion is far from the roughly $4 trillion proposals that the White House has floated and everyone acknowledges that significant concessions would have to be made on both sides to get anything that could pass in the middle,” CNN’s Paul LeBlanc reports. The Republican plan focuses on roads, bridges and more traditional infrastructure, while Biden’s also touches on “human infrastructure” — including child care, education funding and paid family leave.
• Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), meanwhile, told CNN he supports a “more targeted” version of Biden’s plan. “The human infrastructure is something that we’re very much concerned about, and when you think about all that we have done in the last year and plus the Covid bill this year, the American Rescue Plan, an awful lot has been done there, too,” he said.

• “‘I often get asked, how are the security forces, can the security forces do the work in our absence? And my message has always been the same. They must be ready. They must be ready,’ Gen Austin Miller told Afghan journalists at a press conference in the capital Kabul,” the AP reports. “He also said the Taliban not returning to peace talks ‘does not make sense.’ ”
• “His comments came just hours before Taliban negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai appeared to indicate a breakthrough in negotiations. In a terse tweet, Stanikzai said ‘soon the Taliban leaders name will be removed from blacklist. And 7,000 Taliban prisoners will be released.’”

• “The plan will provide up to 34 million children about $375 each to buy food for the roughly 10 weeks they are out of school in the summer,” NBC News’s Phil McCausland reports. The Agriculture Department believes it will be the largest food program in U.S. history.

• “Among the items on the agenda Monday: a session on how to work with the news media, which will include appearances by Ari Fleischer and Sarah Sanders,” Wagner reports.
• “As they seek to retake the House next year, Republicans are grappling with numerous issues, including how closely to align themselves with Trump, as well as tensions between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who holds the No. 3 leadership position in the caucus.”
• Cheney broke with McCarthy this morning over the scope of the proposed independent commission to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol attackl, arguing it should narrowly focus on that specific riot. McCarthy has said the commission’s scope should be broad and include “other episodes of political violence, like Black Lives Matter and antifa protests around the country that have turned violent at times,” the Hill reports.
• “What happened on Jan. 6 is unprecedented in our history, and I think that it’s very important that the commission be able to focus on that,” Cheney told reporters in Orlando. “I’m very concerned, as all my colleagues are, about the violence that we saw, the BLM, the antifa violence last summer. I think that’s a different set of issues, a different set of problems and a different set of solutions.”

• “GOP lawmakers in Montana recently passed new voting restrictions. And GOP legislators in Florida, Arizona and Texas soon could follow — as Republicans scramble to change the ground rules for future elections,” CNN’s Fredreka Schouten reports.
• The GOP moves are putting more pressure on Democrats’ efforts to pass their sweeping election, campaign finance and ethics overhaul bill that would, among other things, “require states to have at least 15 days of early voting in federal elections, allow for automatic and same-day voter registration, restore voting rights to former felons and bar states from prohibiting mail-in and curbside voting.” The bill is set for consideration by the Senate Rules Committee on May 11.

• A Post-ABC News poll found broad mistrust of the shot’s safety after federal health officials paused its use, Amy Goldstein and Clement report. The survey shows that slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults overall say they consider the J&J shot very or somewhat safe after it was halted this month following reports of rare, severe blood clots.
• The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots elicit significantly greater public confidence — more than 7 in 10 people say they regard each of those to be very or somewhat safe.
• “The unwillingness of about 3 in 4 unvaccinated U.S. adults to get the Johnson & Johnson shot points to hurdles facing the Biden administration and state and local public health officials in restarting use of a vaccine that was once heralded for its convenience,” our colleagues write. 
• The poll also found that 56 percent of U.S. adults have gotten at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. “Of the 44 percent who remain unvaccinated against the virus, a majority say they probably will not get a shot or definitely will not do so.”

• The president will give remarks on the state of the pandemic tomorrow, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports. “Three people familiar with the expected announcement said Biden will announce new CDC guidance on whether vaccinated people need to wear masks outdoors, though the final language of the expected announcement is still unclear.”
• Even if you’re vaccinated, you should still wear a mask in public, experts told Ben Guarino.

• “A global coronavirus surge that is driven by the devastation in India continues to break daily records and run rampant in much of the world, even as vaccinations steadily ramp up in wealthy countries,” the Times reports. “Vaccinations have been highly concentrated in wealthy nations: 82 percent of shots worldwide have been given in high- and upper-middle-income countries… Only 0.2 percent of doses have been administered in low-income countries.”
• “India is recording more than a third of all new global cases each day, averaging more than 260,000 new daily cases over the past week,” the Times’s Kenneth Chang and Madeleine Ngo report. So far, only about 8.6 percent of India’s population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, Our colleagues Claire Parker, Paul Schemm and Sean Sullivan reported last night that the U.S. pledged to provide new aid to India, including the materials for making vaccines.

“Lawyers for Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company the Arizona Senate hired to lead a recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million general election ballots, are asking a judge to keep secret its procedures for the recount and shut out the public as well as the press from a hearing in which the documents might be discussed,” the Arizona Republic reports. Arizona Republic reporter Jen Fifield volunteered to observe the hand recount, but was not allowed to take “photos or do any other work a journalist would do in monitoring a recount.” She detailed her experience on Twitter:

Republicans are falsely claiming Biden’s climate plan bans meat. Over the weekend, “a cadre of Republican critics raised the alarm that Biden would take hamburgers and steaks off the menu as part of his new plan to combat climate change,” Katie Shepherd reports. “Conservative ire was sparked by a Daily Mail article that baselessly speculated about measures that could accomplish Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030,” as well as by an interview Trump’s former White House economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, gave Fox Business, in which he claimed that America “has to stop eating meat” to meet “the Biden Green New Deal targets.” “No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue,” Kudlow said. 

The truth is, no one in the administration has signaled that it will include changes to the American diet. Still, numerous GOP lawmakers attacked Biden’s plan:

Some Democrats struck back at the Republicans by pointing out that their claims have no basis. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) mocked the Kudlow interview:

Harris will meet virtually today with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei at 4 p.m. as part of her work to address the root causes of Central American migration. 

In an Oscars bit last night, actress Glenn Close got down to 1988 hit “Da Butt,” a song by D.C. go-go band E.U. that years ago did not get an Oscar nod: 

“This is for anyone who has the faith and courage to hold onto the goodness in themselves, and to hold onto the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that,” said Chloé Zhao, the director of “Nomadland” who last night became the first woman of color to win an Oscar for best director.

When the National Portrait Gallery reopens May 14, visitors will have the first opportunity to see a Trump portrait in the popular America’s Presidents exhibition.