Awaken the great American dream of prosperity to appease a battered country? This is the risky bet that Joe Biden is making with his major investment plans, which are painfully taking shape.
Friday, at the end of the evening, and after many last minute parliamentary adventures, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a huge program of construction and renovation of infrastructure, weighing 1,200 billion dollars for roads, bridges , public transport, drinking water networks.
Already dubbed by the Senate, the other chamber of the American Congress, the text only awaits the signature of the Democratic President, a year almost to the day after the election which saw him beat Donald Trump.
Admittedly, the other big part of the Biden plan, 1,750 billion in much more daring spending on education, health and energy transition, has not yet been voted on by Congress, even if Joe Biden promises that it will be. made the week of November 15.
Of course, the process will leave traces within the Democratic camp, where the divisions between centrist parliamentarians and more progressive elected officials have come to light.
But the 78-year-old president should not shy away from his pleasure.
“As we pass these laws, we will make it clear to Americans: we hear your voices, we will invest in your hopes, help you secure a better future for yourself and your families, and ensure America comes out on top.” great international competition with authoritarian regimes, he explained on Friday.
“Joey”, middle class kid
This is Joe Biden’s big bet: to save a democracy in danger and to calm the divisions dug by Donald Trump by reviving the great American dream of prosperity for all, thanks to a massive intervention of the federal state.
The president likes to introduce himself as “Joey” Biden, a middle-class child born to an Irish-born family in Pennsylvania, in the great industrial area of the “Rust Belt”, the “Rust Belt”. He happily evokes his father, a hard-working man who returned to work after dinner, and who has known his share of financial jolts.
Joe Biden’s priority, he said again on Friday, is to “relieve the economic and social anxiety” of American families in the face of globalization. How? ‘Or’ What? By giving them “well-paid jobs”, by reducing the drug or nursery bill a little, by allowing them to buy shiny “Made in USA” electric cars that will run on new highways …
But his plans remain poorly understood by Americans: since a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, Joe Biden’s confidence rating has continued to drop.
“Nobody elected him to be FDR,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who launched the big “New Deal” stimulus plans to pull America out of the 1930s recession, lambasted in the New York Times Abigail Spanberger, elected Democrat in Virginia – this southern state has just chosen a Republican governor, a stinging setback for the White House.
According to some historians, Joe Biden aspires less to imitate “FDR” than to follow “LBJ”.
Lyndon B. Johnson, who arrived at the White House after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had launched ambitious social reforms, the “Great Society”, giving the federal government an unprecedented weight in the daily life of Americans.
“Big government”
“LBJ” wanted to keep the promise of the Declaration of Independence, this founding text which includes the “quest for happiness” among the number of fundamental rights. Joe Biden, more modestly, speaks of “giving a little air” to American families.
If he finally gets a green light from Congress for his investment plans, it will be an undeniable victory, one year away from traditionally difficult midterm elections for the ruling president’s party.
But Joe Biden’s reformer’s bet is risky, as the recent poll in Virginia has shown. Where the unsuccessful Democratic candidate tried to mobilize against Donald Trump and on national themes, Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won, chose local issues, in particular education.
The new governor of Virginia has stirred a scarecrow that frightens beyond the only conservative camp, that of a federal state considered too intrusive, which gets involved in school programs, family choices, business life … in the United States, it is pejoratively called “big government”.