Biden bets on traditional politics over culture wars

WASHINGTON — As he delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden treaded lightly on many of the culture war issues that play out nightly on cable news: vaccination, immigration, transgender rights and how to teach about race and gender in schools.

He said nothing about gas stoves, which have become a conservative cause célèbre after one official floated a potential ban (not supported by the Biden administration) on new ones. So if climate and public health advocates were hoping for the president to use Tuesday’s address to tout induction ranges, they were disappointed.

If anything, Biden touted an economic plan that he argued transcended cultural and political divisions. While that plan — federal investments in green energy, lower drug prices, higher taxes on the rich — has fierce detractors, it was presented on Tuesday night as outreach to people left behind by the forces that have remade American society in the last 20 years.

It’s part of an apparent electoral strategy — a blueprint for blue-collar voters — with which Biden and congressional Democrats hope to rebuild their appeal in key swing states.

Since the 1980s, Republicans had been making steady gains with working-class white voters in particular. Many of them have been increasingly disaffected by what some saw as the Democratic Party’s elite turn.

In 2008, working-class white voters chose Republican nominee John McCain over Democrat Barack Obama by a 3-2 margin. By 2012, there was no hope of reconciliation. “He sounded like he was going to make things better, but it just seems like it’s going downhill. I’m still poor,” a nursing aide in Pennsylvania told Politico ahead of that year’s presidential election.

“Put Bill Clinton back in the office, and we’ll be better off.”

Democrats tried that four years later — sort of. Hillary Clinton was so confident in her appeal to working-class voters that she hardly campaigned in the upper Midwest, ignoring alarms emanating from Michigan and Wisconsin, where Donald Trump’s appeals were gaining ever more sway.

Trump’s victory was a gut check for Democrats who had once campaigned in packed union halls and delivered speeches from bustling factory floors.

Shortly after the election, the New York Times interviewed a top Democrat who lamented Clinton’s apparent conclusion that working-class whites “were not even worth pursuing,” as the paper put it.

That top Democrat was Joe Biden, then the outgoing vice president.

Now that he is president, Biden is trying to appeal to working-class whites without alienating the diverse coalition that now constitutes the Democratic Party. On Tuesday, he presented his economic policies as a unifying factor.

“My economic plan is about investing in places and people that have been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible,” Biden said, in what was likely a preview of the central message of his reelection campaign, which he is expected to announce soon.

“Maybe that’s you, watching at home,” he continued. “You remember the jobs that went away. And you wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without moving away.”

He then landed on a note reminiscent of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, presidents who, like Biden, came from humble backgrounds: “I get it.”

Even the speech’s most divisive moments were unrelated to culture war touchstones, instead arising from Biden’s spirited defense of Social Security and Medicare.

In short, when it came to the culture wars, Biden showed himself to be a conscientious objector. Instead, he strategically stuck to the meat-and-potatoes issues that he and other moderate Democrats believe will be the winning message should he choose to seek reelection in 2024.

“It’s very much the economy,” Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned closely with the Biden administration, told Yahoo News as Biden prepared to deliver his remarks.

He contrasted that focus with Republican priorities. “For them, the culture has primacy,” Gaspard said.

That may not be entirely true in Washington, where plenty of Republicans have confronted Biden on substantive matters like the debt ceiling, health care costs and energy independence. In those cases, ideological differences are constrained by the realities and intricacies of the budgeting process — funding the military, for example — which tends to instill the leaders of both parties with a measure of sobriety.

When it comes to culture, there are no such limits.

And among the top Republican prospects for the 2024 presidential nomination — none of whom work in Washington today — cultural issues dominate.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2024 candidate, is in the midst of remaking the state’s schools. Taking up another burgeoning conservative cause, Trump — who is officially seeking the Republican nomination — vowed last week to “stop” gender-affirming care for minors and ban federal agencies from promoting “the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, another potential presidential candidate, recently maneuvered — successfully — against a Ford factory that would have produced batteries for electric vehicles in his state. In Arkansas, new governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union, recently banned the word “Latinx” from use by state government agencies.

Such policies have been popular with conservatives, as well as with some independents. At least in part, they are grounded in widely shared questions about where American culture should head, and how it should get there.

But there are also political considerations at work.

A relatively low-profile congressman until his 2018 election to the Florida governorship, DeSantis has become a Republican star by waging culture wars — and winning. Most recently, he forced the College Board to revise an African American history Advanced Placement course that his administration charged was inappropriate for high school students.

“The culture war issues are most potent among Republican primary voters, but that doesn’t mean that an education message can’t be effective with independent voters or the electorate as a whole,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres recently told the New York Times.

Yet even as leading Republicans like Trump and DeSantis animate the GOP base with culture war attacks, the State of the Union made clear that the president intends to remain disengaged from the kinds of controversies that play out nightly on Fox News.

Instead, he described his economic plan as one that would revitalize communities that had been devastated by globalization and automation. He vowed to restore “pride” and “that sense of self-worth” once enjoyed by blue-collar workers who could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle that, in recent years, has become increasingly unattainable for most Americans.

Democrats believe that Biden should stay above the fray. By doing so, he may earn voters’ admiration simply by not engaging in combat over complex issues that resist easy political resolution.

“It's always about the contrast,” Gaspard told Yahoo News.

Contrasts were abundant on Tuesday night.

“We are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight,” Sanders said in her response to Biden. A former White House press secretary during the Trump administration, she is the first female governor of Arkansas. At 40, she is almost certain to play a role in national politics in the years to come.

That role will likely include stints as a cultural warrior.

“Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols,” Sanders said on Tuesday night.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats criticized her speech just as ardently as Republicans went after Biden’s. Democratic Party deputy communications director Daniel Wessel wrote on Twitter that Sanders's address was a “substance-free, cynical Trumpian speech fueled by culture wars. Contrast that to Biden’s remarks. There’s your choice.”

During the 2022 congressional midterms, Republicans waged a contest largely predicated on cultural issues. He cared more about criminals than victims. He wanted to force vaccines on toddlers. He embraced transgender rights because he and other Democrats harbored a latent antipathy to women.

The attacks were false. They also turned out to be ineffective.

If those arguments played well in Republican primaries, they fared much less well in the general election. “They were never able to affirmatively pivot,” Gaspard argues. Republican candidates for the Senate such as Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Blake Masters in Arizona simply could not overcome the impression that they were fringe activists uninterested in the mundane business of governing. A few more successful candidates, like J.D. Vance — now the junior senator from Ohio — did manage to make the shift, but better candidate selection might have obviated the need for such tricky maneuvers.

“I see the same thing playing out right now,” Gaspard says. He argues that Republicans are “playing not for the heart and soul of America” with good-faith policy proposals but are instead trafficking in a “toxic nostalgia” that, in his view, Americans will reject.