Joe Biden’s Nixon moment: A policy agenda that could change history — and the

American media, and especially the political press corps, has a history of failure when it comes to explaining the policies that could change people’s lives. Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows when she blamed the media for failing to do enough to “sell” Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. Although that may have been an unwise choice of words, Pelosi’s underlying point was valid. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders echoed her remarks a few days later, stating that “the mainstream media has done an exceptionally poor job” of focusing on what matters in the bill. Observing that the battle over the legislation is covered like a Machiavellian saga out of “Game of Thrones” or “House of Cards,” Sanders added that the press offers “very limited coverage as to what the provisions of the bill are and the crises for working people that they address.”

This is of course nothing new. The press corps prefers to cover politics in the same way it covers the World Series or the Super Bowl. When it comes to the actual substance of policy-making, too many in the news media avoid it entirely, or convey that it’s complicated, boring and almost superficial, like the color of a team’s uniforms, rather than the central issue.

To better understand what is happening to Biden’s agenda right now, it may be instructive  to look at a similar moment in history, not terribly long ago. It’s been 50 years since Richard Nixon (of all presidents) Nixon attempted to launch a “New American Revolution,” one that could have saved millions of lives and perhaps prevented or forestalled the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right. But the media didn’t consider that an interesting story, and the Democrats who controlled Congress didn’t want Nixon to score a political win, so most Americans had no idea it was happening. Nixon’s ambitious agenda largely went nowhere, and we are all worse off for it.

Introduced during his 1971 State of the Union, Nixon’s “six great goals” were designed to “change the framework of government itself” and “to reform the entire structure of American government so we can make it again fully responsive to the needs and the wishes of the American people.” It combined an authentic desire to realize policy objectives like combatting poverty with a conservative emphasis on empowering local governments. Four of the six priorities were a Family Assistance Plan that would have providing a guaranteed base income and job training to poor working families; a health care reform agenda more ambitious than Obamacare, that would have subsidized coverage for lower-income Americans while mandating private insurance for most employed people; environmental regulations that would have expanded the national park system and imposed new limits on pollution; and an innovative plan to streamline the federal bureaucracy.

None of those were enacted at the time, although some were passed later, in indirect or watered-down form. Nixon did succeed in reviving America’s economy by ending the gold standard, imposing new taxes on foreign cars and implementing temporary wage and price freezes. But most…