President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Auburn demonstrated that, despite his advanced age, daunting economic challenges, and a toxic partisan environment, he has a deft political touch.
Biden employed words, symbols and actions to strike just the right notes here — underscoring the importance of restoring U.S. manufacturing jobs, reinvigorating Main Street America, bridging the political divide, and treating those with opposing views respectfully in the public forum.
Rearview Mirror
He didn’t stammer, stumble or fall during his 25-minute speech before an audience of about 180 people at Auburn Manufacturing Inc., undercutting the Republican trope that he’s too frail and senile to run the country for another four years. Nor did he savage his critics, as his likely 2024 presidential opponent, Donald Trump, routinely does. In fact, he made a point of inviting local Republican officials to the event and of praising Second District Congressman Jared Golden, a maverick from within his own party.
Most importantly he addressed the concerns and anxieties that drove voters into the arms of Trump in 2016 — the hollowing out of manufacturing industries, blue collar jobs and smaller communities — by touting his “bottom up” solutions, embodied in such major pieces of legislation as the American Rescue Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and CHIPS and Science Act. He also used the occasion to sign an administrative order aimed at boosting incentives for domestic manufacturing.
In his speech, Biden noted that more than 13 million new jobs, 28,700 of them in Maine, have been created during his administration, that spending on manufacturing plant construction has nearly doubled in the past two years, and that inflation is moderating significantly even as the economy continues to grow.
The choice of Auburn Manufacturing as the site for the speech was itself of symbolic importance. Founded in 1979, it has bucked the offshoring trend of American textile-making, thriving despite cutthroat foreign competition. The locally owned company, which produces extreme heat protection fabrics for the mining, petrochemical, shipbuilding, glassmaking and other industries, has taken the lead in successfully challenging the unfair trade “dumping” practices of China through the Department of Commerce.
Although Rep. Golden has sometimes given the Democratic congressional leadership fits, voting against the Biden administration on several of its signature bills, Biden nonetheless praised him as an “independent voice of the people of Maine,” declaring that he served his district like he had served his country as a Marine “with integrity, honor and fearlessness.” Compare this to Trump’s slashing attack on then Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, his most vocal Capitol Hill GOP critic, in which he labeled her a “smug fool” and declared, “To look at her is to despise her.”
It would be easy to write off Biden’s hour-long trip to Auburn as a mere whistle stop at the start of an election cycle. But that would do an injustice to the skills of a political leader whose style is understated and whose accomplishments are far too often underrated.
When Biden took office in 2021, American confidence was shaken to the core. COVID was still raging, thousands were dying, the American health care system was strained to the limit, the airline and hospitality industries were all but shut down, and throngs of would-be immigrants were stacking up at our southern border clamoring to gain entry.
As the country emerged from COVID, supply chains became hopelessly snarled, street crime rose alarmingly, students struggled to make up for lost classroom time, extremist groups proliferated, and millions of homeowners and renters faced foreclosures and evictions as pandemic-era relief measures expired.
On the international scene, escalating confrontations with an increasingly assertive Communist China and Russia’s 2022 invasion of the Ukraine endangered world peace and American security.
These and other crises that would have challenged the limits of a much younger, more physically vigorous man than Biden.
Yet quietly, patiently and persistently, Biden continued chipping away at each problem, coaxing a divided Congress into passing landmark laws, retooling balky administrative processes, encouraging NATO countries to arm Ukraine for its fight against Russian aggression, and assembling an economic and military coalition to contain Chinese expansionism.
Unlike Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Biden does not have the eloquence or stage presence to intimately connect with the broader American public. What he does have is the political skill to make things happen, both nationally and internationally, at the right time, in the right place, and to the right people.
Actions should speak louder than words, but that’s not always the case with the American presidency. Biden’s visit to Auburn gave him a chance to speak as loudly as his actions.
Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 16 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com
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