The Biden Administration will be utterly different from its predecessor in so many ways. We will get the first taste of the scale of change this week, following Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday.
Over the weekend his new chief of staff, Ron Klain, outlined four overlapping crises that the president would tackle right away. These are the Covid-19 pandemic, the resulting economic downturn, the climate crisis and a national reckoning over racial equity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Huge challenges indeed, and the new administration deserves bipartisan support as he and his colleagues tackle them. As far as the coronavirus pandemic is concerned, several shifts in policy stand out. For a start, the rollout of the vaccines needs both more order and more pace. The Trump Administration essentially washed its hands of the distribution. That was left to the states.
The result has been both a slower rollout that should have been the case, and also uneven distribution of the available stocks. There are legitimate areas for debate, such as whether hospital staff should be prioritised over the elderly in care homes, and whether second shots should be delayed to give the maximum number of vulnerable people a good degree of protection from one shot. But there can be little debate about the need for orderly distribution. Unfortunately, in some states the basic information about who has and who has not got the vaccine is not available.
The Federal Government cannot fix these problems overnight, but a thoughtful administration with good attention to detail can help the states lift their game. Meanwhile there are further simple actions that can be taken to curb the pandemic, including encouraging and if necessary mandating wider use of facemasks.
The second area, supporting the economic recovery, is already in Mr Biden’s sights thanks to a plan that will go before Congress to give a further $1.9 trillion of fiscal support. This is huge, and most welcome. The task before the new president will be to get it through Congress. He will be helped by having a majority in both houses – but Congress being Congress, he may find unreasonable blockages placed in his way. He has huge experience of managing legislation. He may need it.
The climate crisis is such a huge, hulking, existential matter, towering over the entire globe, that it would be unreasonable to expect any sudden practical new initiative in the next few days. What the world will look for will be some early markers for the shift in US policy. President Biden will have to persuade as well as legislate.
The key point supporting action is that this is an economic issue as well as geopolitical one. Notwithstanding its investment in fossil fuels, the American economy is actually one of the early beneficiaries of the long process of decarbonising the world.
The last of the four great challenges, the drive for greater racial equity, is so central to the future of the United States that President Biden’s legacy will be indelibly shaped by how effectively he can lead the country towards that goal. Mr Klain’s use of the word “equity” is central. It is about fairness. Fairness matters, opportunity matters, decency matters. There is no magic wand any president can wave that will make the United States a fairer society. But a good and decent president can lead the country along the path towards that goal.
Decency will be one of the two most important two qualities Mr Biden brings to the Oval Office. Even his detractors would acknowledge that. The other is his choice of people. He is appointing a competent team, people chosen because they have a record of doing their jobs well, rather than being chosen because of their personal (or indeed family) relationship with the president.
That leads to a fifth crisis that the new president must confront: faith in the decency of US democracy. The world has sight, in these tumultuous days, of the profound decency of the many public officials who have sought to make sure that the election process has been correctly followed.
That is something he can build on, nurture and encourage: the return to what is best of America, the public spiritedness of its ordinary citizens.
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