A Biden presidency will face a host of challenges right from the start

WASHINGTON — As former Vice President Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency after a hard-fought campaign with President Donald Trump, he faces a litany of challenges, including a surge of coronavirus cases, a weakened economy and a deeply polarized country.

"The challenges of governance in 2021 will be enormous," said Meena Bose, director of the Hofstra University’s Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency.

The most immediate task for Biden and his vice president-elect Kamala Harris will be to defend the vote count against lawsuits and complaints filed by Trump’s legal team to dispute Biden’s victory as the nation awaits a formal declaration of the winner.

Despite Trump’s refusal to concede, Biden issued an appeal Saturday shortly after the media called the election in his favor to the badly divided American people who voted in unprecedented numbers giving both candidates record support.

"With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation," he said in a statement. "It’s time for America to unite. And to heal."

In his first move of the transition of power, Biden is expected on Monday to address the most pressing challenge he faces — the novel coronavirus that is surging to a record-setting number of cases — by appointing a commission on the pandemic.

But that will just be a start.

Biden will focus on three initial priorities, said Steve Israel, a Biden campaign adviser and former Long Island congressman: solving the pandemic by relying on science and the research and development community, rebuilding the economy, and healing a divided country.

Rebuilding the economy will be key for unifying America, Israel said. "When people feel that the economy is not working for them, and that democracy is broken," he said, "you’ve got to restore their faith, simply by improving their lives."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report Friday showed a softening of the economic recovery, confirming the Federal Reserve’s concern in its report a day earlier which said it is not out of moves it can take to help, but noted that the virus must be contained.

In the lame duck session that will begin Nov. 16, the most immediate legislative issues will be a coronavirus relief package and a spending bill to keep the government open, said Frances Lee, a Princeton University professor of politics and public affairs.

While Democrats still have a chance of winning control of the Senate if their candidates win both runoffs for senators from Georgia seats, political scholars and experts said that appears to be an unlikely outcome and that Biden is expected to govern with a divided Congress.

Next year, Lee said, Biden will face a tough challenge with a divided Congress, depriving him of the chance to pass signature legislation in his first 100 days in office, such as expanding the Affordable Care Act with a public option.

"It’s so unusual for a president to take office like this, with having lost seats in the House and not controlling the Senate," said Lee. "It is hard for me to see where Biden gets his hundred days."

But she added the American public will be spared "major partisan battles royale" in Congress at the beginning of 2021.

"I don’t know if that really fits the public mood to have a big debate over something like the filibuster or court packing or the kinds of things that the Democratic base would be demanding," she said, mentioning some priorities of the party’s progressive and left wing.

Instead, Biden will have to work for bipartisan agreement.

"It will be up to the president to try to organize a workable center-seeking coalition," said William Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow. "The alternative to that is gridlock and trench warfare where only the basics get done. And that’s not what the country needs."

The Democratic Party’s left wing won’t be in a position to demand that its agenda be included in legislation because it won’t pass, he said, so it must decide "how much trouble, noisy trouble they will make for the new president as he does what he must do."

Key to that will be his relationship with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), poised to become the Senate majority leader again, Galston said. "The good news is that they do have a long history of working together in a businesslike fashion," he said.

The compromise issue many experts point to is once again legislation to fund improvements to infrastructure, something that could help cities, suburbs and rural areas, and create jobs — even though that issue stalled and failed during the past four years.

Biden and Congress also must grapple with debt limits and record-setting deficits caused by trillions of dollars lost from the massive tax cuts and the expense of the four coronavirus stimulus and relief bills.

And the Biden administration must address heightened expectations that it will act on the racial reckoning fueled by police shootings of Black men and women, setting off nationwide protests and demands for changes in policing and criminal justice.

Biden also faces a hurdle in managing the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine, especially in "convincing all the skeptical people in the country that a vaccine that’s approved as safe, really is safe" after Trump has "discredited scientific expertise," said Mark Rozell, dean of the George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

"One of the big dividing lines in this election has been how the United States responds to the pandemic," Bose said.

"There’s a large gap and divide between people who support [Trump] and say ‘a vaccine is on the way, and we need to get back to life as we knew it,’ versus people who are saying ‘we’re in for a long winter, and the vaccine is still some time away,’ " Bose said.

"It’s really like speaking to people in two different worlds. If we don’t even agree on what the problems are in this country, then how do you approach developing policy responses?" she said.

Trump and his legal battle challenging the vote total will create a rocky transition until Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20, Rozell said. And Trump himself will be another challenge for Biden to overcome.

"There’s going to be this ex-president with a megaphone in his constituency, and perhaps planning a rematch in 2024. As far-fetched as it may seem to people, I believe Trump is keeping that open as a possibility," Rozell said.

"And so how does how does Biden mobilize the country and overcome polarization with an ex-president with a big megaphone continually stoking the divisions that were a hallmark of his four years in office," Rozell asked.

While most presidents have traditionally refrained from weighing in on their successor’s first term, Israel said the Biden team is prepared for Trump to remain an antagonistic presence.

"Donald Trump is not going away," Israel said. "He will continue to break democratic norms. He will continue to be the face of a resistance, and he will continue to try and deny the legitimacy of a democratically elected president, just as he did with Obama."

John J. Farmer, director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, said "healing the public square" should be a priority not only for Biden but also for Trump as he joins the exclusive club of former living presidents.

"It should alarm either candidate that over 60 million votes were cast against him, and that the country is so divided that civil conversations are becoming almost impossible across the partisan divide," Farmer said.