The one way Biden has broken with Democrats

With help from Renuka Rayasam

TRIANGULATION, R.I.P. — Though his presidency is in its infancy, Joe Biden appears to have brought to an end to the primary governing theory for the past 30 years of Democratic presidential politics. The days of triangulation are over.

Biden has not co-opted policy planks from his opposition or spent time explaining where he disagrees with his own party’s base. During negotiations over his Covid relief bill, he gave only the slightest of nods to bipartisanship. When Republicans sought to turn Mr. Potato Head’s gender identity and Dr. Seuss illustrations into political cudgels, he shrugged and moved on. And when those same Republicans decried the flow of migrants streaming towards the southern border, he chose to proselytize rather than find common ground.

“Rolling back the policies of separating children from — from their mothers, I make no apology for that,” he said at his press conference last week.

Democrats who lived through the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama years probably feel like they’re staring into a political funhouse mirror. The prime lesson Democrats took from the Reagan years was that being caricatured by conservatives as a tax-and-spend liberal was a form of political immolation. Now Biden, a man whose formative Senate years were spent under Reagan, is in the White House and he seems not the least bit bothered by the threat.

“He’s nice and low key and basically saying, if you don’t want to cooperate then we’ll run you over,” is how Howard Dean put it to Nightly. “But he’s doing it in a nice language. … He’s smiling while he steamrolls.”

Triangulation is largely associated with Dick Morris, Clinton’s longtime political adviser whose machinations won him the affections of the 42nd president and few others. Occasionally, people point to Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” as the definitive example of the artifice — a case of a politician positioning himself against his own coalition in order to appeal to the moderate or apolitical.

But Morris says the actual definition is slightly more sophisticated. “It’s not splitting the difference,” he told me. “It is examining the traditional position of each party, taking the things that are popular and keeping them, and taking the unpopular stuff and discarding it.”

As an example of modern triangulation, he said, a president could piece together a gun control package that consisted of conservative ideas like stop and frisk and open carry, as well as Democratic proposals like universal background checks, and a ban on assault rifles and high capacity magazines, then basically telling the parties to take it or leave it.

No one has done anything like that. But at least early in his presidency — and to a far lesser degree — Obama tried his hand at the tactic. He supported drilling off the Atlantic coastline, signed a law to allow guns on Amtrak, pursued a deportation-heavy immigration policy, and ordered a pay freeze for federal employees, largely in an effort to lay the predicate for larger deals on climate change, immigration, deficit and debt and more. Those deals never came.

Rather than start with concessions, Biden has taken the opposite approach. He’s pushing massive legislative packages with major Democratic priorities and negotiating from there. His next initiative won’t be some combination of conservative and liberal proposals. It will likely be a $3 trillion infrastructure, clean energy, parental leave bonanza — either in one or several packages — financed by tax hikes on the rich. And he will likely offer Republicans the chance to get on board or get run over.

Morris said this approach will all come to an end in 2022, when — he predicted with certainty — Republicans will reclaim both chambers of Congress. But until then, don’t expect it to stop. Dean says Biden is taking this route because he recognizes there are no Republicans to triangulate with.

That wasn’t true for Clinton, who could “talk the leaves off a tree” and who, in then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, had, as Dean said, someone both power hungry and “interested in legislation.”

Obama didn’t recognize quickly enough that Republican opposition was immoveable, Dean said. He recalled a conversation the two had after Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary.

“He said, ‘I’ve come through the worst of this.’ And I said, ‘If you believe that you have another thing coming. These [Republicans] are ruthless and they will cut you to ribbons,’” Dean recalled. “He looked at me like I had farted.”

Dean has had no conversations with the current president that resulted in him offering up the facial expression of someone sniffing a putrid cloud of flatulence. Biden, Dean surmised, knew well in advance the modern Republican Party with which he was dealing.

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SPAC ATTACK — The shell companies that many private firms use to go public on the country’s stock exchanges have been all the rage on Wall Street for more than a year. Now, just as their explosive growth shows signs of waning, they are coming under scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, Kellie Mejdrich writes.

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, which have no business operations and whose only purpose is to acquire a private company to then list on an exchange, have become so popular that they have outstripped traditional initial public offerings. The attraction of these so-called blank check companies, which have been touted by everyone from Shaquille O’Neal and A-Rod to Serena Williams? They get to bypass the costly IPO process, where companies must undergo vetting by the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can sell stock.

Now, lawmakers and consumer advocates are raising alarms about the risks facing unwitting investors, particularly retail buyers. And the SEC, which has been pressed by investor advocates for months to take steps to protect investors, is moving in.

“You shouldn’t be able to use a SPAC to evade the disclosures and liabilities inherent upon taking a company public,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), chair of the House Financial Services subcommittee that oversees capital markets and investor protection.

— WH unveils new actions to counter rising anti-Asian violence: Among the moves is a reinstatement of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which was first established during the Clinton administration. The Biden administration also vowed to appoint a permanent director of the initiative to coordinate policies across the government.

— Russia suspected of stealing thousands of State Department emails: Suspected Russian hackers stole thousands of State Department officials’ emails last year, according to two Congressional sources familiar with the intrusion, in the second known Kremlin-backed breach on the department’s email server in under a decade. The hackers accessed emails in the department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the congressional sources said. It does not appear at this point that the classified network was accessed, a third official said.

— Lawmakers anxious over lack of Pentagon picks: The White House hasn’t sent any defense nominees to the Senate since January, when Biden tapped the Pentagon’s top three leaders. Now, some lawmakers are voicing concerns that key leaders — such as a trio of civilian service secretaries — aren’t in place as the administration gets ready to deliver the broad outlines of its first budget this week and Congress ramps up its work toward annual defense legislation.

— Blinken rejects Pompeo’s human rights rankings: Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected his predecessor’s efforts to create a ranking of human rights as he unveiled the State Department’s annual global report on the topic. Blinken didn’t utter former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s name, but it was clear whom he was referring to when he said, “There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.”

— Democrats demand SALT relief in Biden’s next big bill: The House Democrats stepping forward want to see a Biden infrastructure package that repeals the Trump-era limit on state and local tax deductions, known as the SALT deduction. The repeal is popular among blue-state members of their party but carries a significant budgetary cost, making it one of the emerging fault lines in Democrats’ coming infrastructure talks.

— Many Capitol rioters unlikely to serve jail time: A POLITICO analysis of the Capitol riot-related cases shows that almost one quarter of the more than 230 defendants formally and publicly charged so far face only misdemeanors. Dozens of those arrested are awaiting formal charges, even as new cases are being unsealed nearly every day.

— First dog Major bites again: One of the Biden family’s two German shepherds “nipped someone while on a walk,” according to Michael LaRosa, first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, just a few weeks after an incident with a Secret Service employee.

Nightly asks you: We want to hear from people experiencing anxiety about heading into post-pandemic life. Maybe you’re an introvert nervous about returning to the office, or maybe you’re broadly concerned about large social situations. Or maybe you’ve never struggled with social anxiety before and are about to face a new challenge. Tell us what you’re thinking in our form. We’ll share a few responses in our Friday edition.

SHOTS RISE, BUT SO DO CASES — The U.S. is now embarking on its latest Covid experiment: What happens if you let the virus go unchecked in the middle of a vaccine rollout?

Nearly 30 percent of the country’s population has gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, but the vast majority of those vaccinated are people older than 65, writes Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam. At the same time governors across the country have been lifting virus restrictions despite White House pleas. State leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer seem, at least for now, to be banking on vaccination rates picking up in order to save their states.

Covid cases are starting to swell yet again around the country and, this time, infections are spreading among younger people — as well as people who might have been at moderate risk but managed to avoid infection until now.

In Michigan, which has the highest case rate per 100,000 people in the country, hospitalizations between March 1 and March 23 have spiked 633 percent for adults between the ages of 30 to 39 and by 800 percent for adults between the ages of 40 to 49, according to the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. Hospitalizations increased 37 percent for adults aged 80 and older.

Covid is also spreading among Michigan teens as schools start to reopen and youth sports resume. Cases among kids between the ages of 10 to 19 have more than doubled in the last four weeks. The state plans to make all residents 16 and older eligible for a Covid shot starting Monday.

“People need to remember Covid isn’t just about living and dying,” said Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is seeing greater numbers of younger Covid patients these days. They are less likely to die, but they can still suffer from long-term symptoms like fatigue or loss of taste and smell that severely dent their quality of life.

Cases are also growing among people who are being cautious, said Nina Fefferman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee. Earlier Covid waves tore through people who couldn’t or weren’t taking stringent measures — people who worked in hospitals or stores, or those who shunned masks.

But now there’s a “slow burn” among uninfected people who wear masks and take other precautions as the virus and its variants search for more people to infect, according to Fefferman’s research. The spread is caused by a mixture of behavior, variants and just still high virus levels. People who have gotten lucky until now, may see their luck running out as more virus variants circulate and states continue to lift restrictions.

The spread is slower among this group, but the potential is huge. “We’re talking about a giant number of people,” she said.

WHO CAN FIND COVID’S ORIGINS? The team investigating the origins of the coronavirus in China had difficulties accessing the raw data, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said today.

Referring to the team’s investigation into the theory that the pandemic could have resulted from a laboratory leak, Tedros said that he did “not believe that this assessment was extensive enough.”

“Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions,” he added. He made his remarks to member countries before a press conference coinciding with the publication of the report, Ashleigh Furlong writes.

Peter Ben Embarek, team leader of the China mission, also cited areas where the team “had difficulties getting down to the raw data.” This was due to many reasons, he said, noting that restrictions on privacy laws and the sheer scale of the data were also a challenge.

While the team had looked at the lab incident possibility, “since it was not the key or main focus of the studies it did not receive the same depth or attention as the other hypothesis,” Embarek said. Nevertheless, he said it was ranked as the “least likely” possibility.

WH response: “The report lacks crucial data, information and access. It represents a partial and incomplete picture. There was a joint statement, as I noted, that was put out. We also welcome a similar statement from the EU and EU members, sending a clear message that the global community shares these concerns,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at her briefing today.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FEAR — Unions and advocacy groups are racing to convince both documented and undocumented immigrant workers that they should get Covid-19 shots after former President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdowns sowed fears about using government services, Eleanor Mueller writes.

Organizations involved with industries where immigrants are concentrated — such as service, agriculture and domestic jobs — are communicating online in as many as a dozen different languages, launching texting programs, circulating fact sheets and running phone banks to raise awareness about coronavirus vaccination. Some are even running their own inoculation sites.

The Biden administration has tried to counteract vaccine hesitancy among immigrants by stressing that anyone can receive the shots regardless of immigration status and promising there will be no enforcement activity near vaccination sites. But unions and advocacy groups say four years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies coming from the White House have eroded trust in government.

Biden “has said the right thing about equal access to the vaccine, regardless of status,” said Don Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies. “But immigrants don’t always hear that clearly, given that they’ve been living in this context of fear, and basically, disincentives to come forward for anything in the way of benefits or services.”

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