'The honeymoon is over': Biden faces tougher tasks ahead as progressives demand more

The era of good feelings enjoyed by President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party's progressive wing will face a stern test of its staying power as the administration pushes forward into the next phases of its big-ticket policy agenda.

Biden's first hundred days in office saw the passage of his $1.9 trillion Covid relief and economic stimulus package, along with the escalation of an unprecedented mass vaccination campaign that appears, at last, to be beating back the coronavirus pandemic. The success of those high-stakes government interventions has, in the eyes of many on the left, laid the groundwork for broader enhancements to the social safety net on a scale to match the ambitions of Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, author of the New Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson, who enshrined Medicare and Medicaid as part of his Great Society. But the heady comparisons are, at most, premature, and more likely wishful thinking. Even if Biden's aspirations have been severely underestimated, the governing environment today -- even with Democrats in control of Congress -- is less conducive to the kind of enduring rewrites to the American social compact composed by his predecessors.