Biden in a bind: Israel, Gaza fighting overshadows US president’s domestic plans

DEARBORN, Michigan (AP) — US President Joe Biden’s efforts to spotlight his big infrastructure plans are suddenly being overshadowed by the escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians, the conflict sparking protests during his visit to a Ford electric vehicle center in Michigan as the White House faced growing pressure to intervene.

Biden, who planned to use the two week-stretch before Memorial Day to build Republican support for his $2.3 trillion package, visited a Ford plant in Dearborn on Tuesday to make his case that his plans could help steer the country toward a promising electric-car future.

But any presidential script is subject to real-world rewrites, and Biden faces rising pressure to weigh in more forcefully to stop the Middle East violence — as, by a scheduling quirk, he visited a city that is almost half Arab American.

The Ford Rouge plant is in a section of Dearborn that’s estimated to be more than 90% Arab American Muslim, where many of the locals are strong supporters of Palestinians. A series of significant protests were planned to coincide with his visit.

The president’s appearance came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his envoy reached out to Palestinian and regional Arab leaders in the Middle East amid ongoing hostilities between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

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The Biden administration is conducting what it calls quiet diplomacy while declining to press for an immediate ceasefire by close ally Israel and Hamas. The administration is emphasizing working with allies while refraining from publicly criticizing Israel.

All the while, over 200 Palestinians have died in the current round of fighting, including 61 children, and over 1,400 people wounded according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry; the IDF says many were combatants, and civilian casualties were inevitable given that Hamas embeds its fighters and weaponry in residential areas. Twelve people in Israel, among them a 5-year-old boy, have been killed in rocket attacks launched from Gaza toward civilian areas in Israel. Hundreds have been injured.

To this point in Biden’s young term, foreign policy has also taken a backseat. The president has stressed the need to first focus on domestic matters — taming the COVID-19 pandemic and reshaping the economy — to prove that democracies can still compete with global autocracies, namely China.

But the intractable conflict in Gaza has derailed that narrative.

Aboard Air Force One for the flight to Michigan, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was peppered with questions about the administration’s response to the violence before she was asked about electric cars. She defended Biden’s cautious approach to this point.

“Sometimes diplomacy needs to happen behind the scenes, it needs to be quiet,” Psaki said. “He’s been doing this long enough to know that the best way to end an international conflict is typically not to debate it in public.”

During his tour of the Dearborn facility, Biden kept the focus on jobs, the car enthusiast marveling at new technology while stressing the importance of his infrastructure plan.

“We’re at an inflection point in America,” Biden said.

There were protests outside in Dearborn, which is 47% Arab American, most of them Muslim, the highest percentage among cities in the US.

The Biden White House has prided itself on message control and carefully scripting its approach to legislation. The first two months of his term were focused on passing the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and dramatically increasing the nation’s vaccination program.

The pivot was then to Biden’s two-part infrastructure and family plan, which totals roughly $4 trillion. The president has set a soft deadline of Memorial Day to gauge whether there is Republican support. Not one GOP lawmaker backed the COVID bill, though it had strong public support. There have been a few, if fleeting, signs of possible Republican support for the infrastructure plan.

Last week, a group of Republican senators met with Biden and they are to return this week with a counteroffer. There are some hopes for bipartisan agreement on hard infrastructure — like highways and broadband — before Democrats push forward their family plan on a party-line vote. At minimum, aides have said, they want to make a show of reaching across the aisle to reassure moderate Democrats leery of pushing through massive spending bills using a legislative strategy that bypasses Republicans entirely.

Biden’s plan would help transform the automotive sector by making vehicles more mainstream that don’t burn gasoline. He also sees a shift toward electric vehicles as a major part of his plan to fight climate change, and his visit came the day before Ford was expected to release details of an all-electric version of its F-150 pickup truck called the Lightning.

The president also has to overcome a major hurdle before his electric vehicle, zero-emission future becomes reality: the lack of stations where people can plug in and juice up their engines. To that end, Biden has proposed $174 billion for electric vehicles. That money includes rebates and incentives for consumer purchases, along with money to build 500,000 charging stations by 2030.

The White House says the US has just a fraction, about one-third, of the electric vehicle market share that China has, and far fewer public charging points — and needs to catch up before it can take the lead.

At Ford, its F-Series pickups — including heavy-duty versions — have been the top-selling vehicles in the US for 39 straight years. Last year, the company sold more than 787,000 of the trucks, even though it had to close factories for eight weeks at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The F-150 Lightning electric truck, due in showrooms in the middle of next year, will come at a time when only a few Americans have been willing to switch away from gasoline-powered vehicles. Through April of this year, automakers have sold only 107,624 fully electric vehicles in the US. That’s almost double the number for the same time last year. Still, EVs account for only 2% of US. vehicle sales, according to Edmunds.com.

Biden also has pushed the transition to electric vehicles as a way to create good-paying American union jobs for the next generation of transportation. Critics of his plan say that his taxes and the move away from fossil fuels would increase expenses for businesses and possibly cost jobs.

Studies have shown that each electric vehicle sold reduces emissions, although it takes a couple of years to reach that point if coal is used to generate the power used to charge the vehicles.