When Biden Gets Mad

From the Center

Exactly two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, Joe Biden got mad.

It’s possible that Biden simply decided it was time to vocalize his anger. Or maybe his staff advised him that he needed to display some emotion. But regardless of the reason, last Friday Biden definitely pumped up the volume.

“We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy,” Biden said in a speech from the White House. “The choice we face as a nation is between the mainstream and the extreme, between moving forward and moving backwards, between allowing politicians to enter the most personal parts of our lives and protecting the right of privacy.”

The substance of Biden’s announcement did not match the passion of his language. He signed an executive order that called for additional legal support and online data protection, and reinforced his previous commitments to protect the rights of women to access medication abortion and to travel across state lines for abortion services. He turned to familiar political standbys, including an interagency task force and a 30-day review period to identify other options for protecting reproductive rights. And he continued to emphasize the importance of increased voter turnout in support of Democratic candidates in the fall who would back legislation to codify federal abortion rights.

His party’s progressive base was unimpressed. They are frustrated that Biden has resisted more aggressive measures, such as an expansion of the Supreme Court, allowing abortions to be performed on federal property in pro-life states and calling for a national health emergency to give his administration more authority to confront these issues. But they are also upset that the president is not demonstrating the raw emotion and outrage they are feeling on abortion, climate change and several other policy priorities.

The challenge for Biden is that his own base is asking him to be someone other than who he actually is. In fact, Biden ran for president explicitly promising not to be that type of leader. Because of the Democrats’ strong motivation to defeat Donald Trump, they consciously chose a conciliator rather than a warrior, someone who promised to bring the country back together rather than to draw the battle lines even more starkly.
 

But that’s not what they want anymore. The party’s base wants a warrior and they are getting increasingly loud in addressing their dissatisfaction. The irony is that the type of leader who could provide those qualities – a Bernie Sanders, an Elizabeth Warren or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – could not have defeated Trump two years ago, which is why the party turned to Biden in the first place.

Biden did his best. He blasted “the Supreme Court’s terrible, extreme and, I think, so totally wrongheaded decision.” He said the court’s majority is “playing fast and loose with the facts” by misrepresenting the history of abortion rights in America. He became especially animated when talking about the case of a 10 year old Ohio girl who was forced to travel to another state in order to receive an abortion after being raped.

But it wasn’t nearly enough. The following day, more than a thousand protestors gathered outside the White House demanding additional action and chanting “Whose House? Our House” — at the residence of a president who wants to protect abortion rights.  

It was also clear by last weekend that Biden’s team was beginning to bristle under the friendly fire they were receiving from pro-choice activists. Outgoing White House communications director Kate Beddingfield, who let loose with a rare on-the-record explosion:

“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party” but “to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now…”

There’s no way to know whether this reflected a more confrontational strategy from the White House or was simply the momentary lapse from an outgoing staffer. But party progressives did not take kindly to what they saw as a dismissive insult and it appears that this internal party debate is going to continue to escalate.

In the meantime, the midterm elections are slightly more than one hundred days away, raising the question of when Democrats committed to electing a pro-choice Congress will turn their fire toward Republicans rather than on each other.

Exactly two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, Joe Biden got mad. It’s possible that Biden simply decided it was time to vocalize his anger. Or maybe his staff advised him that he needed to display some emotion. But regardless of the reason, last Friday Biden definitely pumped up the volume.

“We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy,” Biden said in a speech from the White House. “The choice we face as a nation is between the mainstream and the extreme, between moving forward and moving backwards, between allowing politicians to enter the most personal parts of our lives and protecting the right of privacy.”

The substance of Biden’s announcement did not match the passion of his language. He signed an executive order that called for additional legal support and online data protection, and reinforced his previous commitments to protect the rights of women to access medication abortion and to travel across state lines for abortion services. He turned to familiar political standbys, including an interagency task force and a 30-day review period to identify other options for protecting reproductive rights. And he continued to emphasize the importance of increased voter turnout in support of Democratic candidates in the fall who would back legislation to codify federal abortion rights.

His party’s progressive base was unimpressed. They are frustrated that Biden has resisted more aggressive measures, such as an expansion of the Supreme Court, allowing abortions to be performed on federal property in pro-life states and calling for a national health emergency to give his administration more authority to confront these issues. But they are also upset that the president is not demonstrating the raw emotion and outrage they are feeling on abortion, climate change and several other policy priorities.

The challenge for Biden is that his own base is asking him to be someone other than who he actually is. In fact, Biden ran for president explicitly promising not to be that type of leader. Because of the Democrats’ strong motivation to defeat Donald Trump, they consciously chose a conciliator rather than a warrior, someone who promised to bring the country back together rather than to draw the battle lines even more starkly.

But that’s not what they want anymore. The party’s base wants a warrior and they are getting increasingly loud in addressing their dissatisfaction. The irony is that the type of leader who could provide those qualities – a Bernie Sanders, an Elizabeth Warren or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – could not have defeated Trump two years ago, which is why the party turned to Biden in the first place.

Biden did his best. He blasted “the Supreme Court’s terrible, extreme and, I think, so totally wrongheaded decision.” He said the court’s majority is “playing fast and loose with the facts” by misrepresenting the history of abortion rights in America. Biden became especially animated when talking about the case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who a gynecologist said was forced to travel to another state in order to receive an abortion after being raped.

But it wasn’t nearly enough. The following day, more than 1,000 protestors gathered outside the White House demanding additional action and chanting “Whose House? Our House” — at the residence of a president who wants to protect abortion rights.  

It was also clear by last weekend that Biden’s team was beginning to bristle under the friendly fire they were receiving from pro-choice activists. Outgoing White House communications director Kate Beddingfield let loose with a rare on-the-record critique:

“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party” but “to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now…”

There’s no way to know whether this reflected a more confrontational strategy from the White House or was simply the momentary lapse from an outgoing staffer. But party progressives did not take kindly to what they saw as a dismissive insult, and it appears that this internal party debate is going to continue to escalate.

In the meantime, the midterm elections are slightly more than one hundred days away, raising the question of when Democrats committed to electing a pro-choice Congress will turn their fire toward Republicans rather than on each other.

Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, Pepperdine University, and the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in politics, communications and leadership. Dan is a No Party Preference voter, but previously worked on four presidential and three gubernatorial campaigns, serving as the national Director of Communications for the 2000 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator John McCain and the chief media spokesman for California Governor Pete Wilson. He has a Center bias.

This piece was reviewed and edited by Managing Editor Henry A. Brechter (Center bias).

Read more of Dan’s writing at: www.danschnurpolitics.com.