Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s first month in the Oval Office has already demonstrated a continuation of his lifelong commitment to seizing challenges and coping with them head-on. His first and prime test is confronting the rampant coronavirus pandemic that has wracked the nation, and he has responded with an aggressive public call for action and cooperation.

In this first month, he has put the country’s top infective-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in charge of its collective response, in contrast to former President Trump’s shoddy and disruptive behavior toward him. Biden has embraced the remedies of social distancing, mask-wearing and severe curtailing of public mingling, and he has personally adhered to them as a patriotic commitment.

At the same time, he has begun to address the major negative economic impact of the crisis, urging guarded reopening of small businesses and schools, while keeping his eyes on morbidity and mortality rates in the pandemic.

In all this, the new president has sought to maintain a public career-long pursuit of political bipartisanship, without abandoning the narrow partisan advantage he now holds of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

In his quest for a huge $1.9 trillion recovery package to restore the stricken national economy, Biden nevertheless has relied on those majorities to deliver that sweeping aid, in the face of strong Republican opposition to what the minority party sees as excessively generous or required.

This push for the massive economic relief has included pitches to state governors for support, even as Biden has sought to include his party’s long call for an expanded federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, staunchly resisted by Republicans. The Senate parliamentarian however has ruled against including the wage measure in the economic package.

In any event, Biden has already shown he intends to be a hands-on president now that he finally has the power to act for the nation. Questions of his suitability for national leadership are rendered inoperative now as he aggressively grabs the reins of leadership.

So far, at least, Joe Biden’s reputation for much globe-trotting as a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman has faded into the background, as urgent domestic priorities pose a broader challenge to him and to his governing skills.

In this sense, Americans may well be taking a new look at the familiar politician often looked upon as a sort of minor figure, who has suddenly been thrust into leadership. Joe Biden is no longer simply the politician who freed the country of the menace of Donald Trump, but now he is also in charge of bringing it back to normal as a thriving economic force at home and abroad.

Indeed, Biden is positioned to deliver what he has ambitiously called “an FDR-presidency” of the sort that lifted this country from the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would be quite a high goal indeed for ordinary Joe Biden of coal-country Scranton by way of tiny Delaware to achieve.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.

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