In the New York Times today, Jamelle Bouie fires away at moderate Democrats who, he says, derailed President Biden's agenda and are now trying to blame progressives for their own failure.
I don't understand this. It's true, as Bouie says, that over the summer there was disagreement about whether to link the infrastructure bill and the social spending bill. Progressives wanted to pass them together while moderates wanted to vote on them separately. "That brought the Democratic Party’s momentum to a sudden halt."
Sure, I guess, but only because both sides stuck to their guns. I don't see how you can exclusively blame either moderates or progressives for this. Then this:
Nor have moderate and conservative Democrats tried to devise an agenda of their own. Instead, they’ve used their remaining political capital to kill the most popular items on the Democratic Party wish list, from tax hikes on the richest Americans and an increase in the minimum wage to a plan for price controls on prescription drugs. They couldn’t even be bothered to save the revamped child tax credit, one of the most effective antipoverty measures since at least the Great Society. Its expiration in December pushed millions of children back under the poverty line.
This doesn't make any sense. Practically every Democratic senator, moderate and progressive alike, supported all this stuff. It failed specifically because of two prickly senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. This says nothing at all about either moderates or progressives.
In any case, the real gripe among moderates has nothing to do with the social spending bill—which, again, they supported. Passing it would have been good for the country, but no one thinks either its success or failure will have the slightest impact on the political fortunes of Democrats this November. Rather, the moderate complaints are all about cultural stuff: defunding the police, CRT, immigration, and so forth.
That's the battleground, not the spending bill. And I'll say this: I'm generally sympathetic to the moderates on cultural issues. At the same time, if they think progressive cultural views are damaging the party, they need to fight back. If they instead stay silent because they're afraid of criticism, then they have no one but their own cowardly selves to blame if the rest of the world thinks that progressive views define the entire Democratic Party. Either speak up or accept responsibility for your silence. That's how politics works.
Well, yes, it’s not the moderates' fault if you specifically exclude the moderates who tanked the bill. C'mon, Kevin, you’re better at argumentation than that.
Seems pretty obvious to me that blame is being laid where it should be: Manchin and, to a lesser extent, Sinema.
Actually Senigma is MORE to blame. She's the one who out of the blue announced she would not vote for the tax increases that were necessary to pay for the BBB bill. That in turn meant the party had to resort to all the fudging and accounting tricks that got up Manchin's nose and fed his concerns about inflation and the deficit.
I was skeptical of Manchin’s concerns over the deficit, but he has held a consistent position - he said the same things as he voted against the Trump tax cuts, and cited the regressiveness of that bill as well. I agree that Sinema’s opposition to any tax increases at all made a bill impossible. One wonders, though, if other Senators might have balked had Manchin not taken the heat.
See https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-votes-no-on-flawed-rushed-tax-plan-
Nope. Schumer. If he had one third Pelosi's skill (or, more probably, determination, because the reality is he doesn't give a fuck) as a herder of cats, this things would've reached Biden's deks.
You overestimate the power of Congressional party leaders in the US system of government. Frankly, it is better that members of Congress ultimately are answerable to the voters of their districts/states*, not to party leadership. Manchin is presumably acting on his belief as to what his constituents want. He may be wrong about that; the voters will let him know in 2024.
*Unfortunately, they are maybe even more responsive to their donors. In theory, that is fixable through campaign-finance laws.
My thoughts exactly. When people say "moderates" that is a way of saying Sinema and Mansion without actually saying Sinema and Mansion. And they did tank the Biden agenda for reasons that are still hard to comprehend.
This is precisely the sort of disingenuous argument that provokes my ire. FOAD, troll.
The argument is in disagreement with the (vague) post by Drum. Nothing disingenuous about it. And you're irate about it? Come on.
Not only that, but it's true. It's not just Manchin and Sinema. There's a good-sized raft of moderate Senators, many of whom were surely pleased that Manchin and Sinema were willing to be the face of "moderate" opposition so they didn't have to. Carper, King, Warner. Hassan. Possibly Tester, Feinstein, Shaheen, Bennet, and Coons as well. BBB was way too far ahead of where they were willing to stand up and be counted. So they weaseled, sat it out, let Manchin do the dirty work for them. Worked great for them. They went home to relax and enjoy being let off the hook while millions of children, and the rest of us, take the consequences.
At least we can rely on all of them to vote for Biden's SC nominee. Yay.
!?!?!? If you don't see the flaw in this argument you're either as disingenuous as he is or just simply logic challenged. Let me lay it out for you in the hope that you're the latter rather than the former.
Premise 1: Manchin and Sinema are 'moderates'.
Premise 2: Manchin and Sinema blocked the BBB.
Conclusion: If premise 1 is true and premise 2 is true, then 'moderates' blocked the BBB.
Premise 1 is true and premise 2 is true, so the conclusion follows.
That is beyond stupid. Lets try another one, without the fancy language (which isn't quite the correct notion anyway, but this is a blog post)
Hitler was a vegetarian.
Hitler was killed tens of millions of people in WWII.
Therefore, vegetarians killed tens of millions of people in WWII.
If you _still_ don't get it, I feel perfectly justified in discounting anything you have to say on the strength of either trolling or inability to follow elementary logic. In fact, I'll feel free to mock you and use you like chew toy.
I have _very_ little patience these days with either sort of folk.
I mean, the entire party is to blame for not recognizing the political reality that to get anything done, they were going to have to cave to Joe Manchin's ego and idiosyncrasies. Sure, it's his fault at the root for being that way about it, but there's not really any reason the rest of the party couldn't have just acceded to his broad strokes and called it a win. There's no reason they couldn't have rebranded the effort and painted it as a win. It's entirely an own-goal.
I suppose it technically isn't all over yet, they still have 2022 to do something - assuming that the Senate doesn't become 49-50 because of illness or something like that, so...
His "broad strokes" were also rather fuzzy. Indeed he rubbed them out and drew them somewhere else every time it looked like a deal was in the offing. The truth is he lost all interest in the BBB bill once he had his precious bipartisan roads'n'bridges act. When he told Bernie Sanders last October he'd be quite happy if the whole bill was killed, he was being honest.
Just come out and say it: Manchin is a Welsher and his word is not to be trusted ever again. At the time, 'progessives' warned that this is exactly what he was and moderates at least pretended to believe that this just wasn't so. Sadly, the 'progressives' were proven right in the end. And contrary to the claims of others that this was purely ego-driven, I'm sure they would have been happier to have been proven wrong rather than right 🙁
At the risk of raising Kevin's ire at political correctness, you should not say 'welsher', or 'I was gypped' or 'jew someone down'. Or 'Dutch courage'. I wonder about 'Dutch treat'. Or 'French' with regards to oral sex, which is, in fact, rather nice.
I don't believe your etymology is correct, but it is safer -- and much more courteous -- to assume that it is. What's another term for someone who refuses to honor their part of the bargain after the other party has delivered on theirs?
'Trumpwad'.
Immigration??? Left wing populism opposes it the most among party vetters. Let's not mistake that again.
Don’t feed the troll.
Come off it, that's simply not true. Progressives reluctantly agreed to split a single bill into two to accommodate the centrists' bizarre obsession with getting something that was "bipartisan". They were promised - repeatedly - that the two bills would be dealt with in tandem. That promise was broken. Instead they were promised - by the president, no less - that Senate Democrats would approve the BBB bill. That promise was also broken.
It's impossible to know how much this duplicity will hurt the morale of rank and file Democratic volunteers and voters, because other factors like the failure to pass any kind of voting rights bill and the failure to hold Trump accountable for January 6 will also alienate left-leaning Americans. But it must surely have a significant impact on turnout next November.
The tragedy is that virtually none of the much-heralded infrastructure bill's projects will even begin this year, thanks to repeated Republican obstruction of government spending bills. Republicans will be able to campaign by jeering at Democrats for accomplishing nothing in two years except the cancellation of child tax credits. Somehow I don't think admitting that maybe Trump Republicans have a point about CRT would help matters any.
Why?? You must split coastal inflation and flyover reinflation. As Republicans learned when they lost Midwestern single issue voters in 2006-8, land matters. A impressive recovery is a impressive recovery. If you support onshoring, immigration curbs, blasting wall street elites and laugh at the stupidity of "CRT", your going to make ground in elections. Republicans are globalist con men.
Troll says "Globz zhu shplort".
There is no culture war without FOX. The "divide" in the country on "culture war"
issues - aka race - are between a fairly large majority and a well-funded minority that the press/media push to front & center of every news cycle.
This is not helped by "moderate" Democratic politicians who care what FOX says to its audience of people who would never under any circumstances vote for a Democrat.
There is no cure for any of this.
The only kulturkampf issue that Kevin mentioned that actually leaves DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY is defund. & even there there is broad agreement it's a bad idea -- only the Russian funded chaos agents of Brand New Congress & Justice Democrats are shilling for it; everyone else wants it gone.
Critical race theory doesn't exist in K12 education; it's as real as Michelle Obama's wanger. Just a GQP log on the disinformation fire.
& immigration? The only Democrats veering toward 1992 Pat Buchanan style isolationism are, unironically, Bernie & his Paleocon economic leftists in #OurRevolution. The moderate Democrats largely agree that borders should be easily accessible, if not "OPEN" (to use a scareword that, like CRT, is just a comforting bosom for GQP voters to rest on, the Glenn Yungkins Vest of campaign trail smears).
If they're dealing with agents of chaos, Democrats need to get smart.
Yet they keep missing it by that much…
I trust Agent 99 to eventually get things sorted.
Republicans have been fighting the culture war since the 60's when Goldwater first indicated that Republicans would be opposing the end of racism (or maybe earlier when Strom Thurmond joined the party). It has intensified and Fox is now the main messenger, but the culture war is not on the initiative of Rupert Murdoch. Trump upped the ante when he concentrated on racist xenophobia. Fox at first did not support Trump, preferring the more establishment Republicans. There are other outlets which would step up - or have actually done so - to get the Republican's culture-war message across if Fox were somehow eliminated.
No it wasn't
Biden "won" because he wasn't Drumpf. Post smarter
No it wasn't
Biden "won" because he wasn't Drumpf. Post smarter
Nope. Republicans voted in larger numbers for civil rights stuff. You need a nostril grab. Goldwater supported 80% of the measure.
Two of the past three administrations lost bigly in its first midterms. One actually gained seats, and today's Dems have more in common with that one.
Biden is not at all like Trump, the corrupt, ignorant, transgressor who accomplished nothing in office while on his way to two impeachments in a scandal-filled one-term presidency.
Biden is not so much like Obama, who saw unemployment soar to 10% as millions lost jobs and lost their homes in the worst economy since the Depression. (And O's big accomplishment, ACA, was actually a negative in 2010.)
Biden is not like Bush in many ways (a good thing, for sure). But he is leading a NATO effort to respond to the Russian invasion, the biggest threat to democracy in the West in our lifetimes. It remains to be seen how that goes, as well as the emergence of the seemingly imminent post-pandemic era and booming economy. But there's good reason to think Biden and Dems will come out of this more solid in the end. They have not gotten everything in their agenda, but he and the D Congress have significant accomplishments to crow about. Not to mention, Dems will be running against a party in disarray that's by all appearances emerging as a Fifth Column at a critical point in our history.
The assumption that the defining issues of the election will be "defund the police" and CRT is stupid. Dems have many great things to talk about with the American public. But they can't wait for the New York Times to do it for them.
And they don't need to apologize for not getting everything that they wanted. It was always going to take more than two years anyway. The intraparty blame game needs to shut down. Hasn't anyone seen the news this week? There's important shit going on.
+10
I'll raise that another +10.
Dems need to make sure that the so-called "cultural" issues aren't what they're fighting on. Take the fight to the Trumpublicans. Tar them all with the Donald Trump brush.
* This is the party that (near) unanimously SUPPORTS the Jan 6 insurrection and attempt to overthrow a free and fair election.
*This is the party that's FOR RUSSIA and its invasion of Ukraine.
* These are the people who block the public roads, because they claim the federal government is "acting uppity", doesn't "know its place." In trying to reduce deaths from a pandemic, no less.
* This is the party that lies constantly and is trying to con YOU, dear Voter (and provide a couple of locally relevant items off the huge list)
The best defense is a strong offense. Don't engage with the nonsense and noise. If anybody actually believes Democrats sodomize babies and then eat them, they're beyond help. If a parent believes little Johnny is getting how-to diagrams of homosexual conjoinings or that nothing that they're taught at school should ever make them "feel bad", they're totally out of touch with education at any level, and probably don't have much of it themselves. And Little Johnny is no doubt spoiled rotten.
Attack, attack, attack. Don't get faked out.
And another +10. Go on the attack. Biden is the leader of the party that does stuff other than tax breaks for the the rich. Make no apologies. Go on the offensive with what you've got which by the summer might be a reasonably strong POST PANDEMIC (let's hope) economy with inflation slowed and maybe stalled.
AND
Unlike Trump who fawned over Putin (and worse we also know) Biden is lining up Europe and NATO and leading the free world against Putin's aggression. When America does that it really is great again. Run on that Dems.
Make it simpler: 'My oppenent supports Russian Nazis.'
I like it but I'll make one change. Make it plural:
"My opponents support Russian Nazis"
It's not just Trump. And if the supposed grownups in the
GOP object (McConnell?) that they should not be included in that charge then they either have to publicly distance themselves from Trump, Pompeo and company or make excuses for them. In either case it puts them on the defensive which is where they belong.
Hell, people! Dems barely managed to make Americans’ lives just a itty bitty teensy weensy bit better when they had a much larger majority than they have now. Some day, liberals actually may have some real power. Till then, we are at a point where things “not getting worse”, overall, counts as a big victory. Some day, we may set our sights higher.
+1
Uppity, um… pundits are being blamed for the failures of democrats. Of course Jamelle Bouie is going to fire back at the so called moderates. I can’t say I blame him.
Kevin is right: there were moderates, quite a few in fact, who supported the BBB bill. To attack Bouie based on this definition "problem" is however more than a little jesuitic. Bouie OBVIOUSLY did not mean to target Klobuchar when he wrote his column.
I agree with Kevin that many progressives are singularly inept at framing their demands: "Defunding the police" is a slogan that will never fly in any democracy worldwide. There is a tendency to dress up good ideas* in too-clever-by-(more than)-half language on the left. Somebody ought to bring some discipline to this.
However: This issue has nothing whatever to do with Bouie's point; it was never an issue in the BBB bill (except for "BBB"; this is also stupid though it came from Joe Biden's camp as far as I can remember). Two "moderates" killed the bill with no cogent policy rationale, no alternative proposal (that would have been work), just for sheer vanity. They deserve to be slapped around much more than they have been. The winner to this argument clearly is Bouie.
Plus: Lets never forget that the BBB bill was in essence the program Biden ran on and won on. That has to count for something too.
No it wasn't
Biden "won" because he wasn't Drumpf. Post smarter
If, as many expect, the Supreme Court overturns Wade, abortion rights will become THE big issue in the Fall elections. At every turn, Republican candidates for office will be asked about their support for draconian anti-abortion laws. I predict it won't be pretty for them. Current squabbles among Democrats will fade into the background.
Moment of truth for the SCOTUS Republican caucus: do they vote their hardline ideology even though it hurts their party’s chances, or do they hand down a narrow, half-baked, middlin’ ruling (which I expect is what CJ Roberts wants) that leaves their candidates some wiggle room? No doubt Alito, Thomas and Coney Barrett will take the hard line.
Kevin is right that the main responsibility for killing the BBB bill (or cutting it down if it does eventually pass) lies on Manchin and Sinema. But other "moderates" had already killed important and popular parts of it, for example real measures to cut prescription drug prices as Bouie says. If Manchin and Sinema had not essentially vetoed the bill it is quite possible that other nominally Democratic legislators would have stepped up with similar objections.
The "moderates" in Congress serve the interests of big money. Like the big-money Republicans they themselves are not primarily interested in culture wars unless it interferes with corporations making money. Republicans actually win elections on culture-war issues, but the "moderates", which actually includes the major "liberal" media, try to shade these issues toward economic matters. Few people nowadays will admit to actually supporting white supremacy so they will give other reasons for voting for Trump and other obviously racist candidates, such as supposed "Marxism" of Democrats, and "centrists" or "moderate" take advantage of this.
The battle between Republicans and Democrats is mostly on culture-war issues - this is how Republicans get their edge with lower-income whites. The battle within the Democratic party is mostly on economic grounds, as big money has a considerable influence. There is also disagreement among Democrats about things like immigration, but this is not what held up the BBB bill or what will hold up future economic changes.
Remember folks, only lefty types and anti-racist street activists have agency. Moderate Dems and Republicans of all stripes do not.
"Moderate" and "progressive" are the wrong terms for the Democratic senators. Noting that Sanders caucuses with the Democrats but is not one, there are no progressive Democratic senators. There are moderates, conservatives, and extreme conservatives, with Manchin fitting in that last category.
Well my two Senators are Democrats and unless I'm missing something Markey and Warren are progressives and you can add several others at least. Sherrod Brown comes to mind.
You're missing something. I don't remember the exact words but Warren said she's enthusiastically committed to capitalism. That makes her a moderate, maybe a conservative.
Pretty sure Sanders is committed to capitalism as well. Your definition of progressive is foolish.