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The speaker had an alarming warning for his audience: for the first time ever, Social Security benefits may not reach beneficiaries this month thanks to cuts to the government office that handles them. But if the message to the gathering of advocates for disabled persons on Tuesday night was urgent, the delivery was all-too-familiar.
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“Folks, let’s put this in perspective,” former President Joe Biden intoned. “In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the Social Security system, people have always gotten their Social Security checks. They’ve gotten them during wartime. During recessions. During a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. Now, for the first time ever, that might change. It would be calamity for millions of families.”
It was Biden’s first public speech since leaving the White House, and it brought it all back. There was the former President’s favorite feigned indifference to his 2020 rival, referring to “This Guy” as a stand-in for Trump. There were the cliches: “They’re shooting first and aiming later,” Biden said. And there were the awkward sentence constructions. “In fewer than 100 days, this new Administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It’s kind of breathtaking it happened that soon.”
It’s the comeback no one is asking for, starting just 85 days after Biden left the White House.
There is a rhythm to most post-presidencies, with most Commanders-in-Chief stepping back for a period out of the spotlight. Trump, of course, defied trends, but Obama traveled the globe and palled around with his celebrity friends. George W. Bush retreated to Texas to take up oil painting and largely swore off politics. Bill Clinton took a (brief) minute to cede the spotlight to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who assumed office as New York’s junior Senator with 17 days left on her time as First Lady. All began work on their Presidential libraries, quietly raising money behind the scenes.
Biden has taken a different path since stepping down. He has been back in Washington every couple of weeks for meetings about his post-presidential life. Last month he came to pick up a lifetime achievement award from one of his most loyal unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He popped up at a Model UN event in New York and this weekend for a Passover seder with Delaware’s Governor. He appeared in black tie for opening night of Othello on Broadway, snubbing another star-studded play, Good Night and Good Luck led by George Clooney who penned a brutal op-ed urging Biden to leave the 2024 race, earning permanent exile from the Biden orbit.
Closer to home, Biden has started on the outline for his memoirs. He has scaled-back his calls to pals on Capitol Hill, taking a breather from the day-to-day political brawl. To the bewilderment of even his best allies in the Senate, there has been no hard movement on a presidential library. And he has done zero fundraising in an environment where dollars get harder to raise the further the asking party is from the action. Some of Biden’s most excuse-prone donors say they are not even sure where Biden plans to build his library, whenever he does get around to it.
If he’s less interested in fundraising than in getting back in the public eye, it may be because he wants to draw the contrast with Trump’s tumultuous start to his second term. Democratic faithful readily point to what they insist is Biden’s record of accomplishment: a tax credit that led to the lowest rate of childhood poverty in U.S. history; millions in spending to ease the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic; huge subsidies for U.S. businesses through investments in the clean-energy sector; and an economy that added more than 16 million jobs. And Biden clearly relished the opportunity to step back on stage, joining the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled conference in Chicago Tuesday.
His political instinct isn’t wrong that Social Security is a good re-entry point: 73 million Social Security recipients are older and disabled, and even if the checks do get out this month, Republicans are on a collision course over funding the program. Trump has repeatedly promised he would not cut it, but the math doesn’t add up in the spending plans he is pushing. Congress is pursuing a spending framework that makes deep but vague cuts, and there are really only a few piles of money big enough to cover them. The Senate framework sets a baseline of $4 billion in reductions, while the House is chasing at least $1.5 trillion in spending slashes.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, has already cut the Social Security Administration by 10% and shuttered dozens of regional offices, putting an unsustainable stress on the system. Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and suggested cuts to automatic spending programs have to be on the table. White House officials insist that he’s merely talking about fraud, but Democrats don’t buy it.
It’s why Democrats, in search of a coherent message in the post-Biden era, have rallied around threats to Social Security. House Democrats used Tuesday as a national day of action on the entitlement program. Senate Democrats launched their first ads of the cycle on Tuesday, targeting Republican incumbents in Maine and North Carolina. Republicans can hardly hold public events without confronting enthusiastic protests demanding no changes to the retirement safety net. Meanwhile huge audiences have turned out for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even deep-red places like Utah, while Sen. Cory Booker’s record-breaking marathon speech on the floor drew rapturous reactions.
But Biden’s Tuesday evening event reminded everyone why the former President hadn’t been able to generate the same enthusiasm. Biden joked about his half-century in public service, pointing to legislation he championed as a lawmaker, “as a United States Senator 400 years ago.” At another point, he mocked Musk’s obsession with zombie beneficiaries. “By the way, those 300-year-old folks getting that Social Security, I want to meet them,” Biden said. “Hell of a thing, man. I’m looking at longevity. Because it’s hell when you turn 40 years old.”
The 27-minute speech Tuesday gave no one nostalgia for Biden. Even fewer think him sticking around is going to fix any of the long-term, structural problems facing Democrats. Biden may want a comeback, but if he pushes his luck, he could find himself in a lonely camp.
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