How Biden is trying to avoid the pitfalls of Obama’s first 100 days

• The Biden administration appears to have taken pragmatic lessons from Obama’s first 100 days.
• With a split Senate, Biden is showing a willingness to pass important bills with a simple majority. 
• Biden allies are signaling he wants to move fast and go big, with or without the GOP in Congress.
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Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama took office amid some eerie parallels.

Both found themselves confronting economic crises worsening by the day during their transitions. Both inherited rising federal debts and deficits. 

With urgently needed stimulus packages first on their agendas, the pair had to immediately make a big ask of Congress that could diminish their negotiating leverage down the road. Both Obama and Biden read up on FDR and his first 100 days ahead of their inaugurations, studying the theory that presidents have a brief window – yes, 100 days – to enact the most consequential programs of their legacy. 

There are two notable differences in how the pair have started out, however.

When it comes to Congress, Obama had much healthier Democratic margins to deal with than Biden does. By the end of January 2009, Obama had 255 Democrats in the House and a solid majority of 56 in the Senate to count on.

Biden, by comparison, has one of the few split Senates in US history, with just 50 Democrats in the chamber plus Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote, when necessary. In the House, Democrats carry a slim majority of just 221 members following some unexpected losses in the 2020 election.

The other notable difference between Obama and Biden's White House entries - aside from the deadly attempted coup right before Biden took office and the pandemic that continues to ravage the country with the death toll nearing 450,000 - is Biden's willingness to cut Congressional Republicans loose, and to do it early.

"We have learned from past crises that the risk is not doing too much," Biden said on Friday at the White House. "The risk is not doing enough."

'I feel like I'm back in the Senate'

The canon of Obama-era memoirs and other historical accounts of his presidency usually dwell on how much of the 44th president's first 100 days were wasted on healthcare negotiations that ultimately failed to get much Republican support. The details and who to blame may differ, but the dragged out timeline through 2009 into 2010 is not in dispute.

Just one Republican in the House - Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act, and that was after it already cleared the necessary 218 votes to pass, all from Democrats. When it reached the Senate, not a single Republican voted for the ACA despite months of negotiations.

Obama lost political capital when shooting his shot with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in early 2009. The bill got watered down and proved toxic in public opinion. 

With Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package already in trouble, he and his administration have wasted no time waiting around for 10 Republicans to help them break the 60 vote filibuster-proof threshold required for most legislation.

Senate Democrats moved swiftly to cut the GOP loose, taking the first step yesterday - with the approval of the Biden administration - towards passing the stimulus package on their own by going through budget reconciliation, a more constrained legislative process that allows for a simple 51 vote majority instead; then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the same process to pass tax cuts in 2017.

"I feel like I'm back in the Senate," Biden said after meeting with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss their trimmed down counterproposal to his stimulus plan. Biden served in the senate for four decades before becoming Obama's vice president in 2009.

What Biden's note of bonhomie did not signify was that the White House adamantly repeated that he was not negotiating with those senators, but simply hearing them out.

"It's an exchange of ideas," White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki said of the meeting. "This group sent a letter with some outlines and top lines with their concerns and priorities. What this meeting is not is a forum for the president to make or accept an offer."

Hope and change vs. unity and healing

If the early Obama years were marked by a bruised sense of optimism from a president who campaigned on being able to transcend the partisan bickering of Washington, then the early Biden weeks can be understood as an attempt to learn from those stumbles under much bleaker circumstances.

Biden's campaign ethos of "unity" and "restoring the soul of the nation" may not have been too far off from Obama's "hope and change" - at least tonally - but initial moves from the Biden White House show a more guarded pragmatism that Obama did not embrace as fully until he was five years into his presidency.

Right after being sworn in on his family bible, Biden began cranking out executive orders, and he's on a record breaking pace so far, signing more executive orders in his first two days than President Donald Trump did in his first two months.

Obama had a much slower pace of executive orders in his first 100 days, and only began using them more frequently after Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2014.

The Biden executive orders and embrace of budget reconciliation are signs that they are comfortable with going big and leaving Republicans behind, having learned the price of waiting on GOP negotiations from the Obama years.

While the Biden administration's rhetoric may not sound more pedal-to-the-metal than Obama's, the early indicators on paper paint a different picture.