Joe Biden needs two things to beat Trump in a gen­er­al elec­tion: to win over young peo­ple, and to devel­op an effec­tive and con­sis­tent response to the cur­rent coro­n­avirus cri­sis. He’s fail­ing on both.

At best, it creates the impression Biden isn’t aware of what's in his own plan; at worst, it makes him appear to be cynically adopting multiple positions.

Through­out his infre­quent pub­lic appear­ances over the last few weeks — at his March 12 press con­fer­ence and the March 15 Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate, for instance — Biden has tend­ed to avoid out­lin­ing spe­cif­ic pro­pos­als for deal­ing with the coro­n­avirus cri­sis. Instead, he points peo­ple to Joe​biden​.com, to read the near­ly 7,000-word plan his cam­paign first released weeks ago. Even the release of an updat­ed plan on March 26 has not ade­quate­ly made his approach clear.

With­in the first five min­utes of his major March 23 address, his first pub­lic appear­ance in near­ly a week while the cri­sis wors­ened, Biden direct­ed view­ers to read that ​“very detailed, in-depth plan,” opt­ing to talk about only a few aspects of it. When jok­ing­ly asked by talk show host Jim­my Kim­mel on March 26 if he had thought about call­ing Trump to advise him, Biden replied that ​“all kid­ding aside,” the two-week-old plan had ​“laid out in detail what I thought had to be done.”

In oth­er words, Biden clear­ly views this plan as essen­tial for under­stand­ing how he plans to respond to the cri­sis should he win the pres­i­den­cy. And yet there are numer­ous dis­crep­an­cies between the plan and what Biden’s been telling audiences.

Take the Defense Pro­duc­tion Act, the Kore­an War-era law that allows the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to direct the pro­duc­tion of essen­tial resources by the pri­vate sec­tor dur­ing emer­gen­cies. Biden has urged Trump to use it to ​“rad­i­cal­ly increase the sup­ply of crit­i­cal goods need­ed to treat patients and pro­tect our health­care work­ers and first respon­ders,” and ​“build a med­ical arse­nal.” On Tues­day, he told MSNBC he had called for its use ​“a while ago,” and told CNN that it ​“should’ve been enact­ed months ago,” and that he called on Trump to enact it ​“two, three weeks ago.” Lay­ing out his ​“detailed plan” to Kim­mel, Biden said that ​“for exam­ple, I call for the Defense Pro­duc­tion Act to be used,” before trail­ing off, seem­ing­ly unable to recall oth­er specifics.

Biden is right that Trump has dithered on using the wartime law, invok­ing the act but declin­ing, for explic­it­ly ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, to use it to direct pri­vate-sec­tor pro­duc­tion. But Biden’s push for its use appears to be a rel­a­tive­ly recent strategy.

The Defense Pro­duc­tion Act wasn’t men­tioned in the first ver­sion of Biden’s plan, which instead talked about ​“work[ing] with busi­ness­es to expand pro­duc­tion of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment” and to ​“incen­tivize greater sup­pli­er pro­duc­tion of these crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant med­ical­ly [sic] sup­plies.” In fact, Biden first called on Trump to invoke it only on March 18, 19 days after Health and Human Ser­vices Sec­re­tary Alex Azar first float­ed the idea and min­utes after Trump had already announced he was par­tial­ly invok­ing it. (Demo­c­ra­t­ic rival Sen. Bernie Sanders only just beat Biden, call­ing for the law’s invo­ca­tion on March 17).

Biden is also send­ing mixed sig­nals on how far he is will­ing to go in terms of gov­ern­ment spend­ing. A life­long deficit hawk who vot­ed for a bal­anced bud­get con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment three years in a row, Biden’s plan nonethe­less states he ​“believes we must spend what­ev­er it takes, with­out delay, to meet pub­lic health needs and deal with the mount­ing eco­nom­ic con­se­quences,” a line he repeat­ed in his March 12 speech. Though the plan doesn’t spec­i­fy the cost of any of its pro­pos­als, these lines seem to imply a rejec­tion of peace­time spend­ing lim­its in the face of an emergency.

Yet Biden has since giv­en a dif­fer­ent impres­sion. Speak­ing about a pos­si­ble Main Street bailout pack­age a few days lat­er at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate, Biden said that ​“the prob­lem is, the poli­cies of this admin­is­tra­tion eco­nom­i­cal­ly have … we’ve eat­en a lot of our seed corn here. The abil­i­ty for us to use levers that were avail­able before have been used up by this godaw­ful tax cut of $1.9 trillion.”

Last Mon­day, Biden called for ​“keep[ing] every­one paid through this cri­sis … while still pro­tect­ing the Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers.” Such lan­guage doesn’t sug­gest the kind of lim­it­less spend­ing in the face of cri­sis promised in his plan. And while a Biden admin­is­tra­tion could con­ceiv­ably give itself more room to maneu­ver by rais­ing tax­es, Biden has reject­ed the wealth tax­es favored by Sanders and Eliz­a­beth War­ren and plans to bring in six times less rev­enue than either of them.

It’s also not exact­ly clear what form of eco­nom­ic assis­tance Biden is envi­sion­ing. In his pub­lic appear­ances, Biden tends to speak in gen­er­al­i­ties. In his March 12 speech, he called for ​“imme­di­ate bold mea­sures to help Amer­i­cans who are hurt­ing eco­nom­i­cal­ly,” and ​“relief that will be large in scale focused on broad­er health and sta­bil­i­ty of our econ­o­my.” ​“We should be doing every­thing in our pow­er to keep work­ers on pay­rolls, make small busi­ness­es health­i­er, help the econ­o­my come out on the oth­er side strong,” he said last Mon­day, call­ing for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to ​“pro­vide the resources to make that hap­pen.” The gov­ern­ment should ​“take care of those peo­ple who are in des­per­ate need now,” he told MSNBC, lat­er reit­er­at­ing to CNN’s Jake Tap­per that the gov­ern­ment ​“make sure that they are not going with­out the eco­nom­ic means that are nec­es­sary to keep their house­holds moving.”

When he did drill down to specifics, Biden ini­tial­ly called for emer­gency expan­sion of paid sick leave and unem­ploy­ment insur­ance, in addi­tion to per­ma­nent paid sick leave. But as the scale of the cri­sis has grown, he seems to have become more vocal about bold­er mea­sures. ​“We have to put a freeze on evic­tions, we got­ta put a freeze on mort­gage pay­ments,” he told The View on March 24, adding that the gov­ern­ment ​“rush monies to peo­ple and small busi­ness­es and oth­ers that need it now.” ​“Cash relief needs to go out as fast as pos­si­ble to those who need it the most,” he said a day earlier.

Yet cash pay­ments have bare­ly fea­tured in Biden’s plan. Their only men­tion is in the sec­tion cov­er­ing Biden’s State and Local Emer­gency Fund, a fund of inde­ter­mi­nate size that gives may­ors and gov­er­nors, not the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, the ​“flex­i­bil­i­ty” to decide how to respond to the crisis.

“Where gov­er­nors and may­ors deter­mine it is nec­es­sary to ade­quate­ly address the full range of eco­nom­ic pain cre­at­ed by the COVID-19, the fund will autho­rize such lead­ers to direct­ly draw on it to imple­ment broad­er pro­gres­sive cash or tax relief,” the plan states. ​“That could include cash pay­ments to work­ing fam­i­lies, unpaid care­givers, seniors, those with dis­abil­i­ties, and chil­dren, or a child allowance. It could also be used to fund new leg­is­la­tion to expand State Earned Income Tax Cred­it relief.”

In oth­er words, under a Biden pres­i­den­cy, state and local gov­ern­ments can decide whether they want to send checks to fam­i­lies, which peo­ple they think deserve to get this mon­ey, or if they’d pre­fer to just turn the mon­ey into tax break instead — and even then, only if they ​“deter­mine it necessary.”

On the oth­er hand, Biden is sup­port­ing the coro­n­avirus emer­gency bill that has been the sub­ject of days of con­gres­sion­al wran­gling, includ­ing its pro­vi­sions of direct checks of $1,200 per Amer­i­can mak­ing less than $75,000 a year, and $500 per child. Biden has cau­tioned that ​“it’s not every­thing that I would want,” and indeed, these pro­vi­sions have come under heavy crit­i­cism from pro­gres­sives. Not only does the bureau­cra­cy involved mean the pay­ments will come far too late for many fam­i­lies, but the means-test­ed, one-time sum of $1,200 falls far short of the pro­pos­als for uni­ver­sal pay­ments of $2,000 a month per fam­i­ly for the dura­tion of the cri­sis, $1,000 a month per Amer­i­can until a year after the cri­sis is over fol­low­ing an ini­tial pay­ment of $2,000, and $2,000 a month per adult and $1,000 per child, all respec­tive­ly pro­posed by pro­gres­sives like Sanders, Rep. Rashi­da Tlaib (D‑MI), and Rep. Max­ine Waters (D‑CA).

Does Biden pre­fer a larg­er pay­ment? If so, how much larg­er? Would it be means-test­ed or uni­ver­sal? Would it be a one-time check or con­tin­u­ous? How does he feel about the poten­tial­ly months-long delay involved? And does he still pre­fer to devolve pow­er to state and local gov­ern­ments to dis­trib­ute this money?

Biden him­self hasn’t clar­i­fied. His defend­ers say he’s try­ing not to step on Democ­rats’ toes dur­ing nego­ti­a­tions; yet as the prospec­tive nom­i­nee, not only is he meant to be set­ting the party’s agen­da, but he should also be putting for­ward ideas that will com­pete against Trump come the gen­er­al elec­tion, who has improb­a­bly rid­den his cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly bun­gled response to the cri­sis to his best-ever approval rat­ings.

Biden’s approach to mort­gages and evic­tions faces sim­i­lar con­fu­sion. Con­trary to his state­ment on The View, there is no evic­tion freeze laid out in Biden’s plan. Rather, he leaves it up to gov­er­nors and may­ors to draw on the Emer­gency Fund ​“to imple­ment rental assis­tance, no-inter­est for­bear­ance or mort­gage pay­ment relief.”

There is an added risk to Biden’s del­e­ga­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty to may­ors and gov­er­nors when it comes to cash pay­ments, and rent and mort­gage relief. Such dis­cre­tion poten­tial­ly puts mil­lions of Amer­i­cans at the mer­cy of con­ser­v­a­tive, sci­ence-deny­ing gov­ern­ments at the state and local lev­el, who may pre­fer not to give what they see as hand­outs to work­ers they believe should be risk­ing their lives and going to work. These are gov­ern­ments like that of Mis­sis­sip­pi Gov. Tate Reeves, who recent­ly reject­ed calls to lock down his state amidst ris­ing Covid-19 cas­es because ​“Mississippi’s nev­er going to be Chi­na.” Or they may be one of the 14 states that have still not expand­ed Med­ic­aid since the pas­sage of the Afford­able Care Act ten years ago.

Biden’s Sec­ond Plan

Biden’s team has since released an addi­tion­al plan on March 26, this one focused on how ​“to save our econ­o­my and help our fam­i­lies weath­er the storm.” Lead­ing with the Defense Pro­duc­tion Act, it’s a three-point pro­pos­al whose sec­ond plank is a task force to impose over­sight on the relief mon­ey being spent by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and the third ​“bring[ing] the lead­ers of Con­gress togeth­er to build the next deal.”

There are appeal­ing specifics in the campaign’s new plan. It calls for Biden’s scaled-back stu­dent loan for­give­ness, and an increase of Social Secu­ri­ty checks by $200 a month, a con­crete num­ber attached to his platform’s vow to increase ben­e­fits for old­er Amer­i­cans. But these are not new ideas for the Biden team. His demands for emer­gency paid sick leave, free coro­n­avirus test­ing and treat­ment and a free vac­cine are like­wise reit­er­a­tions of demands made in the first plan.

Like the first ver­sion of the plan, Biden con­tin­ues to encour­age ​“work-shar­ing,” an Oba­ma-era pol­i­cy cham­pi­oned by left-lean­ing think-tanks like the Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress and the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic and Pol­i­cy Research. Broad­ly speak­ing, the pol­i­cy incen­tivizes employ­ers to keep work­ers on their pay­rolls by reduc­ing work hours, help­ing to keep unem­ploy­ment rates low. The idea only gets one brief line in the lat­est iter­a­tion, how­ev­er. It’s also unclear how much of an impact it would have in the cur­rent cri­sis, when mil­lions are los­ing jobs because many busi­ness­es aren’t phys­i­cal­ly able to stay open for pub­lic health reasons.

Biden’s oth­er demands through­out this lat­est plan are sim­i­lar­ly vague. They include ​“addi­tion­al checks to fam­i­lies should con­di­tions require” on top of the one-time $1,200 pay­ment passed by Con­gress, with­out any detail beyond that. The plan promis­es to ​“cut through the red tape” to deliv­er unem­ploy­ment insur­ance ​“with­out delay,” but with state unem­ploy­ment web­sites crash­ing across the coun­try, it doesn’t spec­i­fy how. Biden would ​“would tell large com­pa­nies seek­ing tax­pay­er assis­tance that they need to make hard com­mit­ments” not to mis­use that mon­ey, the plan tells us, and oth­er­wise ​“hold the strictest line on bans on buy­backs and rais­es for exec­u­tives,” ​“impose the high­est scruti­ny on pay­roll plans,” and ​“not let com­pa­nies off the hook.”

What that means in prac­tice is left up to the reader’s imagination.

While final­ly includ­ing the Defense Pro­duc­tion Act that was left out of the orig­i­nal, there are still things miss­ing. Through promis­ing ​“all nec­es­sary fis­cal relief to states,” the plan doesn’t clar­i­fy if Biden is stick­ing by his orig­i­nal idea of let­ting state and local gov­ern­ments decide how to bail out work­ing Amer­i­cans. Nor does it make any men­tion of the evic­tion freeze Biden has tout­ed in interviews.

Since its release, Biden has again got­ten ahead of his own plan in inter­views. In a CNN town hall last Fri­day, asked by a view­er about a rent freeze, Biden said he would ​“freeze it and for­give it,” cit­ing the time span of ​“at least the next three months.” Asked by Ander­son Coop­er if he would sup­port mora­to­ri­ums on util­i­ty shut-offs, he answered: ​“Absolute­ly. I’d do it nation­wide.” Nei­ther a rent freeze nor a util­i­ty shut-off mora­to­ri­um appears in either of Biden’s plans so far. The cam­paign made sure to add Biden’s recent call for for­giv­ing at least $10,000 in stu­dent debt into his lat­est plan; why hasn’t it done so for these policies?

Adding to the con­fu­sion, Biden hasn’t ref­er­enced his March 26 pro­pos­al in any of the pub­lic appear­ances he’s done since its release. In fact, the day it came out, he was still refer­ring Jim­my Kim­mel to his orig­i­nal, two-week-old plan. With dis­crep­an­cies between the two, as well as with Biden’s own pub­lic state­ments, it’s not clear where a pub­lic won­der­ing what Biden would do as pres­i­dent should be looking.

Lag­ging behind

Much of this points to a larg­er prob­lem that Biden’s cam­paign will need to over­come to both estab­lish itself as a leader on the coro­n­avirus response, as well as win over young vot­ers. From the begin­ning, Biden has lagged behind the party’s lead­ing pro­gres­sive and youth-ori­ent­ed voic­es, and even some Repub­li­cans. When Biden was only call­ing for emer­gency paid sick leave, Sanders was already call­ing for a mora­to­ri­um on evic­tions, fore­clo­sures and util­i­ty shut-offs .

The cash pay­ment pro­pos­al Biden backs falls far short of pro­gres­sive demands. He hasn’t gone near­ly as far as Waters, for instance, who is call­ing for a sus­pen­sion of all cred­it pay­ments (includ­ing cred­it cards and per­son­al loans), cred­it report­ing, debt col­lec­tion and repossession.

And while his plan calls for ​“elim­i­nat­ing cost bar­ri­ers for pre­ven­tion of and care for COVID-19,” he hasn’t gone as far as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑MN), who is call­ing for all pri­vate hos­pi­tals to be tem­porar­i­ly nation­al­ized as has been done in Spain and Ire­land, or Sanders, who is call­ing for emer­gency uni­ver­sal health care for the dura­tion of the cri­sis. Both pro­pos­als are vital at a time when job­less claims rose more than 3 mil­lion in the space of a week, mean­ing poten­tial­ly mil­lions of Amer­i­cans were thrown off their health insur­ance — a prob­lem nei­ther Biden’s plan nor Biden him­self is yet offer­ing a solu­tion to.

Biden’s inabil­i­ty to respond to this par­tic­u­lar issue was shown in CNN’s town hall. A view­er who was like­ly infect­ed with coro­n­avirus com­plained about the lack of avail­abil­i­ty of test­ing and described her strug­gles with the pri­vate insur­ance sys­tem: her small employ­er didn’t pro­vide health ben­e­fits, so she paid $2,000 a month for insur­ance. She won­dered what she would do when her sav­ings final­ly ran out.

Biden’s response, while assert­ing she ​“should not have to sac­ri­fice any­thing,” entire­ly skipped over her dilem­ma: He told her three times that test­ing should be free, said she would be cov­ered by the expand­ed unem­ploy­ment insur­ance in the lat­est coro­n­avirus bill, and called for Repub­li­cans to drop their law­suit against Oba­macare. When Coop­er point­ed out mass lay-offs also meant the loss of health insur­ance for many, Biden con­tin­ued to tout his pub­lic option plan that pre­serves employ­er insur­ance, which he assert­ed would ​“cost close to a bil­lion dol­lars” — $749 bil­lion less than the esti­mate from his own cam­paign.

The Biden cam­paign did not respond to an emailed list of ques­tions seek­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion on all of these matters.

A pro­gres­sive response

The Biden cam­paign should clar­i­fy its candidate’s stances on mat­ters like cash pay­ments and evic­tion and rent freezes, and rec­on­cile the dif­fer­ences between the two plans it’s put out. As is, the gulf between Biden’s pub­lic state­ments and the con­tent of the plan he con­tin­ues direct­ing peo­ple to read is con­fus­ing — and that’s not even includ­ing the addi­tion of a sec­ond plan. At best, it cre­ates the impres­sion Biden isn’t aware of what’s in his own plan; at worst, it makes him appear to be cyn­i­cal­ly adopt­ing mul­ti­ple positions.

Sec­ond­ly, if Biden wants to win over young vot­ers, the best way to do that is to sin­cere­ly adopt the ideas being pushed by the politi­cians most pop­u­lar among them, such as Sanders, Tlaib and Omar. A watered-down stu­dent debt for­give­ness plan isn’t going to cut it, and nei­ther will vir­tu­al round­ta­bles whose func­tion is to make Biden seem relat­able, with a few words of sym­pa­thy for the strug­gles fac­ing young peo­ple thrown in.

But to do this, Biden will have to com­pro­mise his career-long aver­sion to big-spend­ing gov­ern­ment pro­grams. Just as he ​“became more and more a believ­er in bal­anced bud­gets” over the course of the 1970s and 1980s due to that era’s shift in pol­i­tics, Biden must now catch up as pol­i­tics moves rapid­ly in the oppo­site direc­tion. He must aban­don his career-long war on gov­ern­ment spend­ing and fed­er­al pro­grams, and embrace big gov­ern­ment and deficit spend­ing. Doing so can make him appear both a leader in this cri­sis, and win over the young vot­ers he so des­per­ate­ly needs. The ques­tion is, after a life­time of doing the oppo­site, and a year of court­ing well-heeled donors, can he bring him­self to do it?