

That’s the one tune Biden can’t play, and the real reason he doesn’t sell out venues like he used to. Expect plenty of oldies: stimulus spending, better wages, a little gun control to boot.īut not inflation. Biden will be attending a convention put on by the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labor union. And then, to Philadelphia, which Klain no doubt scheduled as the tour’s hometown special. Here’s a job worthy of a president, offering comfort and aid amid a crisis that’s received little attention, even as Biden will surely take the opportunity to play a little of his old climate change material. And given that disaster has already struck in the form of Kamala Harris being scheduled to speak, the summit seems destined to be forgotten.įrom there, it’s on to New Mexico, where Biden will address that state’s recent devastating wildfires. It also elides over the very real hemispheric problems of drug violence, migrant caravans, political instability. Yet this seems unlikely to mollify Latin America, which is still wary of Donald Trump and reeling from the pandemic.

Thus, billions more in investment to Central America, a new regional health corps, etc., etc., etc. Mexico’s president refused to even attend, instead sending his foreign minister.īiden is hoping he can win over the Americas with his usual plan of spending gargantuan sums of money. The meeting has already been shadowed by controversy, as the White House made a point of excluding certain authoritarian regimes, like Cuba and Venezuela, while including others, such as Canada. First, to Los Angeles, where he’ll flaunt his old-school foreign policy chops at the Summit of the Americas, a confab between the United States and her Latin American and Caribbean neighbors.


And while his handlers seem to have talked him out of doing the whole thing via Amtrak, there are other reasons to think this is not a typical presidential jaunt.įrom out of the White House has come news that the president is frustrated with his dismal poll numbers. So it was that yesterday Biden left Washington on a tour that sent him to Los Angeles with stops afterward in Santa Fe and Philadelphia. Yet the president does seem to be following a maxim known well to every aging rocker: when nothing else is working, you hit the road. Joe Biden would never be in a hair band a hair plugs band, maybe.
