Biden’s pragmatism wins approval

US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday seems to have evoked a lot of curiosity, some amusement, opposition as well as support for different parts of his speech. Like a good Democrat, he attacked big business in the pharma sector, in the tech sector and in the oil sector.

He accused Big Pharma for hiking price of insulin and putting millions of American diabetes patients, who run into millions in the country, in a difficult position. His attack on Big Tech was on grounds of beguiling children in the country with addictive gadgets, which would hamper the intellectual growth of the kids. And he attacked Big Oil for raking in profits by exploiting the war situation in Ukraine and the consequent cutting off of Russian oil from the global supply chain.  Biden wanted the high profits they were making to be taxed.

Hard-headed business folk would hardly agree with the president’s criticism but even they would not be able to deny the corporates have a social obligation to the elderly and to the youngsters in America, and that oil companies cannot remain indifferent to the inflation in the American economy which is creating the crisis of cost of living in the largest economy in the world, a crisis which is already plaguing Great Britain and Europe.

But Biden faces the challenge of pushing through his policies with the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives or the Congress. So the president was forced to appeal to the Republicans to cooperate and praising the virtues of bipartisanship for the sake of good governance. The only time in his speech when the Republicans and the Democrats together applauded the president was when he talked of the social security and Medicare for the senior citizens.

The Republicans did not want to be seen as anti-old people. The population of seniors in the US is large enough as in all other advanced economies, and whatever be their economic philosophy, the Republicans understood the imperatives of creating the safety network for the vulnerable section of society. In the last few months, ever since the mid-term November elections gained a simple majority in the Congress, Biden has been striving to work with the Republicans.

Biden also faces the challenge of projecting himself as the strong man with a credible policy framework to run for a second term of the presidency. In America, the incumbent presidents usually get re-nominated, and they even go on to win the election for a second term. In the last 45 years and more, only three presidents failed to get re-elected: Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, in 1980, George Bush, the Republican in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2020. Biden is trying to place himself in a comfortable position of being a president who did not commit any big errors. That is why, he wants to prove that he is a Democrat president who can work with a Republican Congress.

And Biden has an advantage over Trump in the sense that is not a confrontationist either at home or abroad. He has taken a tough stance against Russia over the Ukrainian war and he was steadfast in supporting the Ukrainian war effort. But he did not allow the war to escalate into a bigger one which would have created a world crisis. At the same time, he has been reaching out to China despite sharp differences because he seems to understand that it would be a bad idea to push China completely into the Russian camp. It is this pragmatic politics and his general affableness that makes the Americans trust him despite his 80 years.