WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
S
omething called Build Back Better
may eventually pass, but the dream
of a transformational, pan-coali-
tion spending extravaganza ex-
pired on Sunday, when Sen. Joe Manchin
III (D-W.Va.) announced he was giving up
on it. And this marks a turning point for
the administration: For all the talk of a
“21st century New Deal,” President Biden
will not, after all, be the next Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
In this, Biden is normal. No matter how
narrow or contingent their victories, all
Democrats arrive at the White House
nursing hopes of being the next Lyndon B.
Johnson or FDR, while Republicans reck-
on to reincarnate Ronald Reagan. Almost
all are disappointed because such politi-
cal genius is rare, and because even those
who have it usually come to office at the
wrong time to make their political genius
count.
Political genius matters — Jimmy Cart-
er and George W. Bush illustrate what
happens to presidents who meet a crisis
without it. But Bill Clinton, whose charm
and ambition might have vaulted him
into the top tier, was instead doomed to
the middle by an uneventful era.
Roosevelt was elected on the back of a
global financial crisis, while John F. Ken-
nedy’s assassination, and his opponent’s
radical conservatism, propelled Johnson
into office with landslide majorities. Clin-
ton had modest majorities and a modest
recession, neither of which gave him the
scope for his massive health-care reform.
When it comes to radical change, it’s not
enough to solve some real problem. Un-
less that problem is pushed to the very top
of voters’ minds by an acute crisis, the
general electorate’s natural inertia will
tend to swamp the revolutionary fervor of
your base.
Nonetheless, politicians always forget
how much timing matters. For 30 years,
Republicans have been campaigning on
Reaganite tax cutting — and delivering in
office, even though the electoral returns
to tax cutting keep diminishing. It is
telling that after all his claims to repre-
sent a new Republican Party, the one
major piece of non-emergency legisla-
tion Donald Trump managed to pass was
a tax bill.
Yet the 1980s tax cutter in chief was
very much a man of his moment. When
Reagan entered office, stagflation was
undercutting the credibility of economic
technocrats and breeding tax revolts
through “bracket creep.” Because tax
brackets weren’t indexed to inflation,
then over 10 percent a year, routine cost-
of-living adjustments kept pushing ordi-
nary people into higher brackets, though
their purchasing power was stagnant.
Reagan wooed those voters with a plausi-
ble solution: deregulation and tax cuts.
Had Reagan been elected a few years
earlier, or a few years later, his presidency
might read very differently to history. In
1979, Carter nominated a new Fed chief,
Paul A. Volcker, who raised interest rates
to 20 percent, triggering a sharp recession
that finally halted the inflationary spiral.
Had Reagan run in, say, 1978, he might
have nominated a different chair and
presided over more of the inflation that
had doomed Carter. Had Reagan himself
nominated Volcker, he’d have finished his
first term in the shadow of Volcker’s
recession — likely dooming his reelection
chances. And if he had run in 1982, as
inflation was easing, voters might have
been less worried about bracket creep,
and Reagan’s anti-tax message perhaps
wouldn’t have resonated. Reagan’s suc-
cess wasn’t just a product of the macroeco-
nomic environment but which years
America happened to hold elections.
Or consider Barack Obama, a charis-
matic superstar who had better reason
than any other modern president to fancy
himself the next FDR. Unfortunately, the
Democrats who made that comparison
forgot that when FDR was elected in 1932,
the Great Depression was three years old,
and already in the process of hitting rock
bottom. Obama, by contrast, was elected
just months after the Lehman Brothers
collapse sent the global financial system
into convulsions. His political situation
was arguably closer to Herbert Hoover’s
than FDR’s, and when he rammed
through major legislation anyway, his
party suffered a major midterm loss.
Biden’s world-historic crisis doesn’t
look very Rooseveltian either, though one
could forgive his team for thinking other-
wise in January, before it turned out there
was still much more pandemic left to
preside over. And even if the vaccines had
ended covid-19 on schedule, he still
wouldn’t have an FDR-style mandate
because a pandemic just doesn’t call for
one. A contagious disease may justify
intrusive and expansive public health
measures — temporarily. It does not
convince frightened voters that the econ-
omy has permanently broken and should
be junked in favor of a government-de-
signed replacement. His minuscule ma-
jorities are also nothing like what FDR
and LBJ had to work with.
Like most of the presidents before him,
Biden misread an expansive mandate
into an election that called for something
more modest. And, like other presidents
who mistook their mandate, his adminis-
tration has come to grief. Now he must try
to work himself out of it in time to face the
voters who elected him to be the presi-
dent, rather than a timeless historical
icon.
MEGAN MCARDLE
Just accept
that Biden
is not the
new F DR
“I
t’s been quite a year,” allowed
Secretary of State Antony Blink-
en as he began a final 2021
speech on Tuesday — and his
face, etched with the fatigue and stress of
the past 11 months, told the story.
Blinken went on to offer the kind of
upbeat valedictory you’d expect at year’s
end from Foggy Bottom. But at a time
when the United States is being tested as
rarely before, it’s important to separate
the genuine achievements of the Biden
administration from some stunning re-
versals — and to offer a theory of the case
about the ups and downs of our foreign
policy.
President Biden’s team has gotten one
thing right, in spades — its effort to
restore America’s global alliances and
partnerships after four years of malign
neglect under Donald Trump. The United
States’ greatest strength abroad is this
web of interdependence that Trump had
foolishly disdained (or, worse, tried to
monetize). Biden began a repair job on
day one, and it has mostly been successful
— with the notable exception of consulta-
tion about Afghanistan.
Our strengthened partnerships buffer
some of the crises that are festering
abroad. NATO is acting like a real alliance
again. This past week’s meeting of its
military council framed clear, decisive
plans for how NATO would respond to a
Russian invasion of Ukraine — by moving
troops forward toward Russia, not re-
treating under pressure.
The United States is stronger in Asia,
too, because of an alliance upgrade. The
Quad — linking the United States with
Australia, India and Japan in politics,
technology and someday, perhaps, mili-
tary planning — is the best check against
Chinese dominance of Asia. And in terms
of hard power, the AUKUS alliance with
Australia and Britain to build nuclear
submarines and share other military tech-
nology might be the most important
strategic move in decades.
The AUKUS rollout offended France,
which wasn’t informed that it would be
losing its submarine-building franchise
Down Under. But Blinken and others did
some hasty and mostly successful repair
work. Recent French cooperation in the
Ukraine crisis reminds us that they’re a
good ally. They get it.
Biden’s biggest blunder was the man-
agement of the chaotic withdrawal from
Afghanistan. Biden owns that one person-
ally. He was absolutely determined to end
America’s longest war, and he’s a stubborn
and sometimes irascible man. He got
what he wanted, but at a significant cost
to the image and credibility of the United
States. The military and CIA took care of
their own on the way out, but the State
Department didn’t adequately manage
the implosion of the government in Kabul
and the foreseeable need to evacuate tens
of thousands of Americans and Afghans.
Afghanistan was damaging in reputa-
tional terms. After Biden’s boasts in June
that “America is back,” Kabul showed
instead a picture of pell-mell retreat.
Adversaries are now testing American
resolve — and the sturdiness of those
alliances Biden and Blinken have been
trying to repair.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is
pushing for a new Yalta division of Europe
by threatening an invasion of Ukraine.
Biden’s response has been a sensible com-
bination of seeking to deter an invasion
and preparing for the possibility that Putin
will roll across the border anyway. That
planning includes a bold warning that the
United States will support an anti-Russian
insurgency if Putin does invade.
The Biden team was eager for better
relations with Russia, a relationship with
more stability and predictability. In that
spirit, Blinken has said he’ll talk with
Moscow about anything. But he drew a
useful line Tuesday in rejecting Putin’s
demand to create a new division for
spheres of influence in Europe, a concept
that he rightly told reporters “should be
relegated to the dustbin of history.”
Putin, alas, isn’t the only leader testing
Biden’s resolve. Iran is sprinting toward
nuclear-weapons capability; China is rac-
ing to build a huge nuclear arsenal as well
as delivery systems the United States
might not be able to track. Talk about
destabilization. It’s a wonder that North
Korea’s Kim Jong Un hasn’t joined the
poke-America festival.
My take is that Biden in his first year
has proved to be remarkably coldblooded
and pragmatic in his foreign policy. For all
the backslapping and Irish charm, he is
quite unsentimental. Trump talked about
pulling out of Kabul; Biden did it. Trump
talked about opening a new round of
diplomacy with Moscow; Biden did it.
The problem is that Biden’s realpolitik
engine is mounted atop an administration
that stops at every congressional red light
— especially those flashed by progressive
Democrats. And it’s fueled by a democrat-
ic system that is demonstrably failing to
produce consensus, which frightens allies
and encourages adversaries.
Being a realist in foreign policy some-
times means being unpopular and facing
criticism for not putting enough stress on
values. That Kissingerian space — valuing
order and predictability over bromides
about democracy — is where you sense
Biden wants to be. But there’s a discon-
nect between the private tough guy and
the public pussycat we sometimes see in
Biden’s foreign policy.
DAVID IGNATIUS
Biden’s
foreign policy:
Tough guy
vs. pussycat
BY SUSAN MOLINARI
AND BETH BROOKE
W
e live in a world designed
for men. The top shelves
in many supermarkets
are too high for many
women to reach. Many cellphones
are too big for an average woman’s
hand. And because women’s bodies
have a lower metabolic resting rate
than men’s, the typical office is
about five degrees too cold for wom-
en.
Over the years, we have learned to
live with these inconveniences. We
bring a sweater to the office or stick
a knob on the back of our phones to
make them easier to hold. But in
some instances, unequal design
costs lives.
For example, more than
40,000 Americans are projected to
die in automobile crashes this year
— a “crisis,” according to Transpor-
tation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Im-
portantly, those deaths are not suf-
fered equally. While men are more
likely to cause crashes, women are
more likely to die in them. When
compared with a male crash victim,
a woman is 17 percent more likely to
die, according to a study conducted
by the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration (NHTSA),
and 73 percent more likely to be
seriously injured in a vehicle crash,
according to a 2019 University of
Virginia study.
Why? All the crash test dummies
are male. Even the “female” dum-
mies the government requires in
tests are just smaller versions of
male dummies. As a result, many
cars are not primarily designed to
keep women safe.
This must change. But so far, the
government has refused to make it
happen.
When the crash test dummy was
first standardized in the mid-1970s,
its proportions were based on an
average-size man. But women’s and
men’s bodies are different. Women
have different bone density, and our
abdomens occupy a different posi-
tion in most car seats than men’s do.
As a result, women are more likely to
sit closer to the steering wheel and
suffer from severe whiplash in an
accident.
We’ve known this for years — and
we also know how to make cars
safer. Over the past few decades,
crash test dummy technology has
evolved to the point where a new
generation of dummies can better
replicate men’s and women’s unique
physiology. Advanced female dum-
mies have more sensors in the abdo-
men and pelvis to measure impacts
with seat belts, more facial sensors
to provide information about how
and when air bags should inflate,
and more ways to measure impact
against the chest to reduce risk of
rib fracture. The data provided by
advanced female dummies could
inform adjustments to car design at
the seat belts, headrests, air bags,
pedals and more.
And yet, the voluntary program
administered by NHTSA to provide
vehicle safety ratings for consumers
still requires only that male dum-
mies be tested in the driver’s seat in
several of its key crash tests. As a
result, a five-star safety rating for a
car or truck means it was highly
rated for a 5-foot-9-inch, 170-pound
man.
We have much less information
on how safe a car might be for a
5-foot- 2 -inch, 110-pound woman.
It makes no sense. And until the
standard changes, more than half
the population will continue to pay
the price.
NHTSA — the unit of the Trans-
portation Department charged with
auto safety — already has the au-
thority to require car manufacturers
to use the most up-to-date crash test
dummies available, including those
that represent females. And NHTSA
can require both male and female
dummies to be tested in the driver’s
seat. This problem could be fixed
right now, and the solution would
increase the cost of a new vehicle for
a car buyer by less than a dollar.
Federal regulators have known
for decades about the additional
risk female drivers face. But while it
has been researching and testing a
female dummy for almost 15 years,
the agency inexplicably continues to
insist that more research is needed
before it can make a decision. The
longer it waits, the more women are
injured or killed on the road.
The government should also re-
quire vehicle crash testing stan-
dards to be updated on a regular
basis to make it easier to take
advantage of new technology. Diver-
sifying the dummy pool would force
carmakers to adjust their designs to
benefit the people who do most of
the driving and car-buying in this
country — preventing injuries and
saving lives.
We can’t bring back the thou-
sands of women we’ve lost in traffic
accidents over the years or erase the
pain of millions more who were
injured. But we can make cars safer
right now — and prevent our daugh-
ters and granddaughters from suf-
fering the same fate. There isn’t a
battle more worth fighting.
Susan Molinari, a Republican from New
York, served in the U.S. House from
1990 to 1997. Beth Brooke is former
global vice chair of public policy at EY, a
multinational professional services firm.
Crash test dummies are m ale.
Women pay the price for that.
BILL O'LEARY/WASHINGTON POST
Crash test dummies at the National Museum of American History in D.C. in 2010.
’T
was the night before Christmas
when all through our house,
not a creature was stirring,
well, maybe a mouse. Not to
mention three yipping puppies, two mew-
ing kittens and a fake partridge on the
fake twig of a fake pear tree.
The children are all gone, you see —
married, divorced, engaged afar. The two
grandchildren will be home in their own
little beds awaiting the arrival of St. Nich-
olas, ever certain of the jolly one’s naviga-
tional skills and the bright guiding light of
a certain red-nosed reindeer.
Never mind that temperatures have
hovered for weeks in the 70s here in South
Carolina, dipping below 50 only once or
twice to remind us that it is December,
after all. Set aside for the moment the
sickness and suffering of so many people
these days; Christmas isn’t a certain set of
circumstances. It is a state of mind by
which many adults can indulge their ear-
liest memories and children can be swept
into a world of snow with the gentle shake
of a tiny glass globe.
Yes, admittedly, Christmas can be an
annoying confection of grossly excessive
commercialism. But within the homes of
those who share the faith — or at least the
tradition — the annual ritual of anticipa-
tion and delight is worth the aggravation
to the mature psyche. Or so I’ve decided in
justifying my own rather elaborate tend-
ing of the Christmas spirit, notwithstand-
ing all the preceding.
In private life, I’m a relentless decora-
tor, not just during holidays but on all
days of all years. It’s a compulsion born of
a rocky childhood in which multiple
mothers came and went after mine died
young. My second mother, the one I called
Mama, a graduate of the New York School
of Interior Design, was, like her own
mother, a decorator.
I call Mama’s on-location reign of just
seven years in our house our Camelot
period, which, coincidentally, ended the
same year President John F. Kennedy was
killed.
When she left with my little sister, aban-
doning me to my father and brother, she
took most of the beauty, light and joy with
her. At 12, I didn’t hold it against her. All
these years later, I’m grateful for her love,
which was steadfast to the end of her life at
90, and for her showing me how to create
beauty from whatever you have on hand.
By her hand, Christmas was magical.
She was like Tinker Bell wielding a wand
that left sparkles in her wake. Gilt card-
board cutouts gleamed above doorways.
Tabletops glistened with silver candle-
sticks and crystal bowls filled with candy.
Candlelight dappled the covers of Christ-
mas books stacked on coffee tables. And,
music to my little ears, ice cubes tinkled
cocktail glasses to the tune of Perry Como
singing “Silent Night.”
My brother Jack and I were sent to bed
early so that Santa would have time to
assemble a barking poodle and install
batteries before the old elf grew too tired
to read directions. We’d lie awake upstairs,
whispering our best guesses as to Santa’s
current location. Finally, we allowed our-
selves to fall asleep in the belief that Santa
would skip our house if we didn’t.
Fast-forward and I became a parent,
determined to master the art of loving
through beauty and, once a year, to re-
c reate the magic of Christmases past. Fast-
forward again and I’m a grandparent no
longer expected to put on much of a show.
Our three sons now have their own fami-
lies and commitments to tend. Briefly, I
considered a minimalist approach to the
season, but my maximalist soul prevailed.
If it wasn’t moving, I put a bow on it.
There’s a strong possibility no one will see
any of the fruits of my labors, but that’s
okay. As I carried a dozen Christmas bins
from the basement, wondering when ex-
actly I had lost my mind, I realized that I
decorate for Christmas for its own sake —
for the joy of creation and for beauty itself,
even if it’s beheld only by its creator.
Understanding that many people ha-
ven’t had the experiences I’ve had and
may not have the wherewithal to indulge
their children’s dreams, I would offer only
this: The spirit of Christmas is within
each of us and available to anyone. What I
learned so long ago through tumult,
heartbreak and loneliness is that we bring
our own cheer to the party and create our
own joy.
And, no, that’s not easy for me to say.
Far easier is to simply wish you a happy,
healthy holiday and a Merry Christmas.
May your sorrows be few and your spirits
be bright.
KATHLEEN PARKER
Still the most wonderful time of the year
What I learned t hrough
tumult, heartbreak and
loneliness is that we bring
our own cheer to the party
and create our own joy.
