How to Sell Biden’s Agenda
Selling Biden’s Agenda to the Public Should Not Be Complicated
There has recently been ample consternation among the chattering classes about how the Democrats can better sell their so-called human infrastructure bill, the one that they can only pass through the process known as “reconciliation.” Unquestionably, their discourse around this bill has largely been dismal, although it is now starting to improve. Rather than focusing on the details of the bill and constantly mentioning them, Democratic lawmakers and progressive commentators have fixated on a spending number — President Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion, or the at least $6 trillion (possibly as much as $10 trillion) initially and ideally sought by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or the $1.5 trillion counterproposal by conservative Democrat Joe Manchin, or what flimsily ambiguous Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema’s number might be. As disgruntled Republican commentator Bill Kristol recently noted (based on focus group responses reported by Sarah Longwell, the executive director of their advocacy group, Defending Democracy Together), the constant emphasis on a spending figure has caused “soft” Democrats and political independents to simply think that Biden and his party wanted to spend a lot of money and raise a lot of taxes without any clear benefit for voters such as them. And while Biden has long been an earthy, effective, distinctly non-technocratic retail politician, he swung and missed by labeling this agenda “human infrastructure,” the sort of intellectual or wonky term that essentially means nothing and that he usually avoids.
Granted, selling this bill is not — at first glance — that simple. Due to the filibuster (a senatorial contrivance that is essentially unconstitutional, as I suggested in a June article), Democrats needed to sweep as many of their myriad agenda items as possible into one big bill. They could exempt traditional infrastructure projects (roads, bridges, pipes, et al.) due to the bipartisan deal struck in the Senate this summer, while some items (voting rights, police reform) would not meet the criteria for the “budget reconciliation” process in the Senate, the only way that Democrats can pass anything on their own due to Republican abuse of the filibuster. But everything else — from immigration reform to climate catastrophe measures — needed to be packaged together in one vast, complex bill.
Still, selling it to the public need not be complicated. The solution is to focus on a core set of measures and principles that prove amenable and attractive to most Americans and label them in basic language. The nucleus of the bill, one might say, can be defined by four major concerns: children, the elderly, climate catastrophe, and pandemic preparedness. There have been other aspects of the proposed legislation, not all of which will make the final draft: immigration, Medicaid expansion, free tuition for community college. But at the bill’s heart are four essential issues that most Americans want to see addressed.
The first involves the bill’s myriad measures to improve the lives of children, most notably young children. In seeking to establish universal pre-kindergarten, Biden is taking one of the best ideas and programs to emerge from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s — Head Start — and granting it universal access. Most Americans understand and accept the notion that if we live in a competitive marketplace, everyone should enjoy the chance to start the proverbial race at the same marker. In other words, all young children deserve equal educational opportunities from the beginning of life, and although true equality in this realm is an impossibility, free public preschool for all who seek it is not. Preschool cannot serve to advantage only those with access and wealth, and the overwhelming majority of Americans agree — hence the fact that according to a poll from December 2020, even 73 percent of Republican voters (along with 95 percent of Democratic voters) support free public preschool.
Likewise, the bill’s proposal to create tax credits that will allow moderate-to-low-income parents pay for quality child care polls at similar levels. A related measure, the child tax credit passed earlier this year under Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, enjoys the support of 59 percent of Americans — including 41 percent of Republicans — according to a September poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos. The current “reconciliation” package, of course, seeks to extend that child tax credit for at least another year. And then there is the component that seeks to guarantee Paid Family and Medical Leave to all American workers. Although the conservative or moderating pressures embodied by Joe Manchin seem poised to trim the proposed leave period from twelve weeks to a meager four, and now even to eliminate it all together, the program would still help parents establish greater and deeper bonds with their babies or kids, benefiting children over the long term. A poll from April 2020 found that three-quarters of all Americans — including 70 percent of Republicans — endorsed the idea of federally guaranteeing Paid Family and Medical Leave (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/viewer.html?pdfurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalpartnership.org%2Four-work%2Fresources%2Feconomic-justice%2Fpaid-leave%2Fnew-polling-paid-family-and-medical-leave.pdf&clen=693727). More recent polling, from this past spring, found support for such concepts at even higher levels in some cases.
In other words, several of the bill’s items can be defined by the imperative of strengthening the lives of children — their education, nutrition (the child tax credits reduce child poverty and hunger, and the bill seeks to expand access to free school lunches), supervision, relationships with their parents, and material comfort (since improved access to child care better enables parents to work). And since children constitute the most vulnerable members of society, such measures prove widely popular across the political spectrum. While a large swath of Americans may value the notion of rugged individualism and self-striving, they also agree that such ethics only make sense if all children enjoy fair — preferably equal — opportunities early in life.
Similarly, most Americans believe in enhancing support for the other group of the country’s most vulnerable citizens: the elderly, especially those seniors who have lost their functional independence. Biden’s originally proposed legislation sought to expand Medicare by finally having the program cover dental, hearing, and eyecare expenses while allowing it to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. The bill also seeks to improve access to, and training for, elder care, where well-paid professional caregivers can tend to seniors in their homes, thus alleviating the burden on relatives who now may be able to enter — or reenter — the workforce.
These proposals, too, prove popular. According to a recent survey from Lake Research Partners, two-thirds of voters deemed expanding access to in-home elder (and disabled) care to be important. Meanwhile, a June poll of 1,175 likely voters conducted by Data for Progress and Social Security Works found 83 percent support for the Medicare expansion — including 76 percent among Republicans. An October survey by Kaiser Family Foundation found nearly identical support for the idea of letting Medicare bargain directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Once again, while Americans may favor the ethos of rugged individualism for the able-bodied, they also support taking care of society’s most vulnerable citizens. Americans feel that Medicare should cover more, not less, and they offer little sympathy for the megaprofits of giant pharmaceutical companies. Thus selling the bill as a means of better caring for senior citizens, in addition to children, should also be logical, easy, and popular.
Unfortunately, some of these proposals may not make the legislation’s final cut, thanks again to the stinginess and dubious motives of Manchin and Sinema, who almost seem to be playing the role of more constructive, bipartisan, moderate Republicans from past eras. At the moment, the Medicare expansion for eyesight and dental care seems like it is off the table or will take the form of a private voucher. Meanwhile, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices seems unlikely to be included or will be narrowed in scope. But either way, the overall bill can readily be sold as a way to improve the lives of seniors — and to reduce the burden on their younger relatives.
Then there is the matter of the climate catastrophe. After a seemingly unending — and steadily worsening — onslaught of forest fires, droughts, floods, and storms in recent years, the power of polluters’ propaganda is starting to fade. An expansive poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want the federal government to adopt greater measures to address the rapidly deteriorating state of the planet. Other polling from after the 2020 presidential election confirmed those results, and as seen in those surveys, support for many of Biden’s specific environmental proposals is overwhelming. Thus focusing on the bill’s ample resources — $555 billion—to address the climate cataclysm constitutes another sensible way of selling the agenda.
The fourth leg of this stool — at least in terms of how to sell the legislation — should be pandemic preparedness. After the coronavirus dystopia that has lasted for the better part of two years, selling Americans on greater investments in pandemic preparedness and associated matters of public health should be easy. In fact, according to a Data for Progress poll released in early September, this aspect of the legislation is more popular than anything else, enjoying support from over 75 percent of respondents. After this recent apocalypse, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to be caught off guard again. Another survey released this fall, this one designed by Dr. Robert Blendon from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found similar public demand for pandemic preparedness.
Unfortunately, in order to appease the penny-wise, pound-foolish instincts of a few centrist Democrats — Manchin and Sinema first and foremost — the investments in pandemic preparedness appear likely to be slashed dramatically. Still, they will make the bill in some form and should be sold to a public eager to see greater resources devoted to this matter. Indeed, Democrats can analogize preparing for the next pandemic to national security spending during the Cold War or in contemporary times to combat international terrorism.
In other words, selling a complex bill can actually be quite simple. Focus on a few central themes that prove popular with the public (children, the elderly, climate catastrophe, pandemic preparedness), describe it in simple language, and orient the details of stump speeches and media interviews to those clear, basic concerns. Republicans will be on the defensive and may instead veer into phony culture war rhetoric that will only alienate swing voters and give Democrats a chance to retain control of Congress in the November 2022 midterm elections.
