was palpable. At one stop, he launched into a series of backhanded compliments, practically apologizing for the president. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming…. He’s not going to go down in the history books … but he is doing a good job.”
Nevertheless, Biden had done his duty, including a speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention in which he assailed the “bankruptcy,” “hollow dreams,” and “hypocrisies” of the Reagan-led GOP’s 1980 platform. Biden had summoned the populist spirit of his first Senate run, condemning Reagan’s “banker friends” and “advisers in the oil industries,” and calling on Democrats to muster the courage to “maintain the historic commitments to the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society.” It was all for naught, with Carter no match for an embittered populace fed up with a decade of recession and inflation and an energized conservative movement working to get their man into office.7
But for Biden, Reagan’s victory had its upsides. Thanks to the defeat of several of his colleagues, Biden moved up a spot on all his committees, including Judiciary, where he would end up the ranking Democrat. And the president-elect’s antigovernment philosophy actually gelled with his priorities.8
“In a strange way,” Biden said, “the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for for the past few years.” Biden’s long-delayed sunset legislation could now move forward, he said. And he, too, wanted a tax cut. “Biden might come out looking like a conservative when he sits in his seat on the budget committee,” noted the Wilmington Morning News.9
Reagan’s presidency didn’t lead to the instant anti-government “revolution” his grassroots backers had envisioned. But by the end of his eight years, Democrats and liberals whose previously steadfast commitment to New Deal politics had already been wavering during the 1970s would abandon it entirely. In some ways, Reagan’s success in transforming his opposition was his most long-lasting legacy, a transformation Joe Biden would help lead.
No Longer Liberal
Biden’s already growing public discomfort with the New Deal legacy made him perfectly poised to drift rightward with the Reagan years. Even as he thundered against Reagan’s platform during the campaign, he had told crowds that in the world of the 1980s, “we can’t solve all social problems by an endless succession of government programs.”
And while he tried to undo Reagan’s scrapping of price controls on oil and gas and voted “to fill the holes in Reagan’s safety net” left by his severe 1981 budget, Biden made clear he was “not concerned about social programs as much as the direction” the country was going. Asked where Democrats should draw the line with Reagan’s cuts, Biden singled out agencies like NASA, Conrail, the Export-Import Bank, and energy research and development. “They’re finding new answers to old problems,” he said. “Instead of social programs, give the Northeast a rail system that works.”
Despite claiming that “the Reagan program will be economically disastrous for most of us in this country,” Biden voted for the new president’s first budget, one of thirty Democrats to do so. The budget was “a triumph for conservatives rivaling the liberal triumphs of” Roosevelt and Johnson, the New York Times wrote: scores of federal programs for health, education, and social services drastically cut back, weakened, or outright eliminated. The cuts threw countless lives into chaos, with 270,000 public service workers losing jobs, more than 400,000 families thrown off the welfare rolls, and more than 1 million workers ineligible for extended unemployment benefits, just to name a few. The Reagan onslaught marked “the reversal,” wrote the Washington Post, “of two great waves of government intervention, the New Deal and the Great Society,” a verdict shared by lawmakers on both sides of the issue.10
As the decade wore on, Biden’s criticism of Reagan’s policies shifted away from their cruelty to complaints that they were fiscally irresponsible and deficit-bloating. “The elimination of federal deficit spending should be the single most important element in a program to achieve an economically sound future for this country,” he said six months into Reagan’s tenure.11
He and the many other Democrats who began talking like Republicans were gently prodded into it by the 1981 tax cut, the other keystone measure in Reagan’s plan to overhaul Americans’ relationship to their government. Biden also voted for this measure, despite calling it “inequitable and inflationary.”12 The Reagan tax cut, the largest in postwar US history, was a lopsided giveaway to the very richest that led almost instantly to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality. Over time, the super-rich would parlay their economic gains into growing political power by exploiting an ever-more corrupt political system—and use that power to roll back much of what had been built under New Deal presidents, creating a growing class of disillusioned, fed-up Americans. That it was the Democrats who had first pushed for cutting the top income tax rate, and that Reagan had initially rejected it, is just one of the ironies of all this.13
The tax cuts did something else, too. As Bruce Bartlett, one of Reagan’s advisers, would later explain, conservative intellectuals wanted “to force a major overall spending cut that would be a political non-starter without first passing a tax cut that creates a deficit so large, something must be done about it.” Indeed, Reagan himself quickly pivoted to fearmongering about the very deficit he had helped create. It was a perfect trap for a political class increasingly allergic to anything resembling New Deal liberalism. And the Democrats, spooked by anti-tax, anti-government revolts and desperate after Carter-era stagflation to prove themselves able money managers, fell right into it.14
Biden was out in front of this shift. Even as he voted against keeping the food stamp program going and for cuts in programs like federal pensions, he voted against Democratic efforts to plug the revenue hole left by Reagan’s tax cut with a series of admittedly regressive tax increases. They were too much of a burden on the middle class, he complained. Griping that the tax system was unfair and too complicated, he signed on to successive tax reform bills that were, in practice, massive tax cuts for the rich. One pared back the number of tax brackets to just three, none of which would pay more than 30 percent; another set a flat tax of just 14 percent for all individuals, one-upping even the flat tax proposal cooked up by the conservative Hoover Institution. 15
Five years after voting for Reagan’s tax cuts, Biden admitted they marked the defeat of a Democratic era. “The Reagan tax cuts have ended growth of the social agenda; it’s all come to a screeching halt,” he said. “There’s nothing [Democrats] can do but keep what’s there.”16
Just as in 1978, a looming reelection in 1984 was key to Biden’s evolution. His popularity, reflected in intimidating poll results, warded away his most formidable challenger for a second time: outgoing Delaware governor Pete du Pont. The task instead fell to John Burris, the state House’s former majority leader and a du Pont ally, whose campaign rested on the charge that Biden wasn’t doing enough to execute Reagan’s economic program.17
Burris was a weak candidate who ran a weak campaign, little different in substance from James Baxter’s. Biden won with 60 percent of the vote, only ten points less than what the polls had shown in March and an improvement on his previous result.18
Even so, Biden once again pulled out all the stops to win. Following what he termed an “olive branch” from Reagan—a spending freeze that also raised taxes—he linked arms with two Republican colleagues on the Senate Budget Committee to introduce his own freeze proposal in 1984. Acknowledging it would be labeled “draconian” (“I don’t know how to do anything else than bring it to a screeching, screeching halt,” he said), Biden’s plan cut $239 billion from the deficit over three years, almost $100 billion more than even Reagan’s proposal, and proposed doing it partly by eliminating scheduled increases for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. It would, he said, “shock the living devil out of everyone in the US Senate.”19
Biden indulged in doomsday predictions to sell the measure, warning that letting deficits go untamed