The first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency were a giddy time for Democrats...
What are the president’s supporters feeling now? It’s not giddiness, though the tentative agreement on a framework for infrastructure spending has delivered a shot of optimism for the summer. Still, a framework is not a law; it’s not even a bill. Without the urgency provided by a 100-day window, the whole political process has slowed down.
There’s a clear pattern: The goals Mr. Biden anchored to a specific date — those 200 million shots, Covid-19 relief before supplemental unemployment benefits expired on March 14 — are the ones he has achieved. Others that are to be done merely as soon as possible are languishing.
Perhaps, to keep an infrastructure bill moving along, the president could announce...that he wants to sign a bill before we reach Day 200...
If Mr. Biden could be persuaded to do something like that, he would be drawing on the power of an overlooked tool in our quest to get things done: the deadline.
I’ve spent the past few years studying the effects that deadlines have on productivity...In each case, one thing was immediately obvious: Deadlines, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, concentrate the mind wonderfully.
...
There are...countless external deadlines that Mr. Biden could seize on to attach to his legislative agenda. He could, for example, announce that the infrastructure bill had to pass by Aug. 6, the last day before the Senate’s August recess. And...[a]ny changes to the 2021 budget resolution passed by reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority, have to be signed by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
If Mr. Biden embraced the use of deadlines to jump-start a summer of significant votes, there are ways he could make them especially effective. The first, which seems counterintuitive, is to set the deadline as soon as possible...
...
I saw this insight in action when I reported on the 621st Contingency Response Wing, a unit of the Air Force that specializes in disaster response. After a hurricane makes landfall or an earthquake strikes, the 621st is often called up to open up new airfields and distribute supplies. Its goal was to be in the air within a mere 12 hours of getting a call from the Pentagon. The ambition of that tight deadline made the unit’s work possible. It had no choice but to be ready, and so it was.
Mr. Biden could also borrow some tactics from what’s known as goal-setting theory, which holds that you should make your goals concrete and difficult in order to achieve them. It’s an antidote to the vagueness of “as soon as possible” and “do your best,” the attitude that seems to be prevailing among the Democrats today... editorials warn that the president’s legislative agenda has hit a wall.
...
...If there was a problem with the president’s July 4 deadline to vaccinate 70 percent of American adults, which we narrowly missed, it was probably that it didn’t move fast enough and aim high enough.
That's his one bad example. POJO moved as fast as he frigging could. He had beer and lottery ticket incentives. The problem with that one was that he gave too much credit to Americans' sense of responsibility to others.
Audacity — “We choose to go to the moon in this decade” — has a way of generating its own urgency.
During the previous administration, the idea of infrastructure week became a rolling punchline for [46-1's] inability to get things done. If Mr. Biden wants to avoid that fate, he needs to unleash a whirlwind of deadlines: a real infrastructure week after Congress returns this month, voting rights legislation passed by Aug. 6, a reconciliation bill covering the administration’s other wish-list items by Sept. 30. Find a date to hang your initiative on and don’t let go.
It's not just one example that's a problem. The problem with these problematic examples is that unlike in a company, in government there is another team trying to stymie you at every turn. Biden will get an infrastructure bill passed but I don't know what it's going to take to pass voting rights with the GOP a great wall of resistance and Joe. Manchin. and Kristyn Sinema unwilling to carve an exception to the filibuster.
It seems to me that in government a president has to set goals and deadlines that he knows he can achieve, not reflexively "difficult" ones. The deadline strategy that the author, Christopher Cox, advocates is still fresh and compelling but in a representative democracy there must be more of the carrot and stick approach. As a veteran and an admirer of the Senate President Biden wants reasoned collegiality, give and take compromise. When that "carrot" does not work a president must needs announce consequences if goals are not met and it is equally crucial that the stick of punishment be applied liberally.
Mr. Cox, the author, draws on his research in companies and his experience in the military. The work place and the military are not democratic, they are more akin to dictatorships. Orders are given. If not followed, an employer must demote or summarily fire the laggard. In the military, those who do not have "the right stuff" must be demoted or dishonorably discharged.
Mr. Cox ends his essay on the lesson of FDR but does not mention the tool that Roosevelt, and Reagan long after him, used so effectively, the bully pulpit. Fly over the GOP's great wall directly to the people.Campaign for supportive representatives of either party; campaign against opponents even of your own. Biden's proposals are popular with the people. To end recalcitrance Biden has to drive a wedge between "his" people and their obstructionist representatives. Here too, however, a president must be shrewd. Franklin Roosevelt badly bungled at the start of his second term. He had the mandate from heaven that President Biden does not. Roosevelt's wall was the Supreme Court. The Court had struck down key provisions of the National Recovery Act. So Roosevelt secretly hatched a plan to pack the court with mid-20th century justices. The court packing plan fell flat and split the Democratic coalition. It was an abysmal failure. But Roosevelt won the war by scaring the shit out of the "nine old men" on the court. At a cocktail reception the Chief Justice took Eleanor Roosevelt aside and told her that all the power the president needed was in his taxing authority. Sure enough when FDR reframed the NRA as a series of tax bills, they passed.
I am long past being up to here with Joe Manchin. A fireside chat isn't going to cut it in this day. A firebomb speech in Charleston probably will not get Manchin to go woolly in the knees either, but reasoned suasion has not worked. There must be consequences. If Manchin thwarts democracy in America he must at least be made to feel all the heat that the president can bring. A firebomb speech would at least demonstrate to others for the future that there will be consequences from this president if you help raise Jim Crow from the dead.
