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Biden’s vice presidency prepped him for his turn in the Oval Office

For eight years as President Barack Obama’s understudy, Joe Biden watched and listened as Obama carried out his stewardship of the nation. He supported Obama’s achievements, guided by the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt in coping with the Great Depression via major economic recovery policies.

Obama, while blowing his own horn recently in a New York Times interview, credited Biden with following his lead in going big on stimulus spending to pull the nation out of the current crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think that what you’re seeing now is Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job, and it will be an interesting test,” Obama said. “Ninety percent of the folks who were there in my administration, they are continuing and building on the policies we talked about, whether it’s the Affordable Care Act, or our climate change agenda … and figuring out how do we improve the ladders to mobility through things like community colleges.”

Obama went on to say that he gave short shrift to selling his agenda. “I think a fair critique of us when I look back is the fact that I was sometimes too stubborn about, no, we’re going to just play it straight, “ he said. “And let’s not worry about how the policy sells if it works. Then that’s what we should do.”

He believes this is a lesson that Biden and his administration have learned. “(T)hey’re mindful of these lessons and they’re saying to themselves, all right, we’ve got to sell this,” Obama said.

“So on health care in particular, how do we make this simple and stupid so that it is easily explained? The expansion of Medicaid, for example, was probably the part of the Affordable Care Act that had the biggest impact. Quick, easy to administer, didn’t have a lot of moving parts, because it was building off an existing program.

“But one thing I was pretty clear about early on, and showed in the ACA, that (when) we are in a hole economically there is no point in us trying to go small bore. Bill Clinton was able, in the second term, to politically go small because the economy was humming and people were feeling good.”

In this sense, Biden was already well ahead of the curve on the ACA, widely known as Obamacare and increasingly popular with voters. Biden took the lead early and often as vice president in defending it against repeated Republican efforts to kill it in the Senate.

Incidentally, it was moderate GOP Sen. John McCain. a Biden friend and occasional bipartisan ally, who saved Obamacare in his dramatic late-night flight from his sickbed in Arizona to the Senate floor shortly before his death.

For all the Republican carping about Biden’s age at 78, and insinuations that he is approaching senility, he has continued to be an involved and consequential public servant. His brief tenure as president has already reinforced that stature. This latest endorsement from Obama for advancing his own administration’s agenda, as Biden did as his running mate, comes as he now strives to “finish the job” that Obama left unfinished in his eight years as president.

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