What is to be Done? Biden Stuck in the Mud
Hello Hackaroos!
Well, we’re (almost) officially into Year Two of the Biden Administration and he’s got a lot of explainin’ to do as we head quickly towards the midterm elections. We give Biden-land some free pointers (worth what they’re paying for them?) on what to do next to get something moving before it’s too late. Then, we turn to the sad state of Trump-land and some tidbits.
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Let’s begin…
WITH YEAR ONE ALMOST IN THE BOOKS FOR BIDEN, WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images News
MURPHY:
Well Gibbsie, when thinking about President Biden’s political situation all I can do is quote your childhood hero and my lifelong arch-nemesis, Vladimir Lenin, who wrote in the seminal pamphlet of the Bolshevik Revolution… “What is to be done?”
GIBBS:
Well, Murphy, to continue on the quote-train, I am more reminded of another hero of yours, the great Prussian leader, Otto Van Bismarck, who once said, “Politics is the art of the possible.” It’s a quote that led to the political theory of pragmatism. What this administration has got to get back to is the idea of understanding that they are governing not in a world where this issue or that issue happen to be popular with 70% of America, but, instead, in a world where the Senate is 50-50. In my opinion, this train got off the tracks strategically in people's minds in Washington months ago. And, as you always say Murphy, political control and ideological control are often very, very different. That couldn’t be more true than right now. As we head into the second year of the Biden administration, it is time for a full reset. It seems clear we aren’t likely to get a Build Back Better plan that’s valued at $1.8 trillion. And if you look at the arc of this debate, we also weren’t going to get one that costs $10 trillion, or one that costs $6 trillion or one that costs $3.5 trillion.
That’s not to say that each plan doesn’t have many, many worthy ideas and proposals. Remember, this is about the art of the possible. Find a trillion dollar plan that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will sign off on that invests in two or three big and important things and do them really, really well over a 10-year period of time.
Then Murphy, which is what you've been saying all along, they're going to have to take the rest of the agenda that they want to see happen and make it their political agenda. Make it what they fight on every day about over the next 11 months heading into the election. If you can’t raise the minimum wage, have a vote on it, take the defeat in the Senate and make it a campaign issue. Take the same vote on cutting prescription drug prices. Lose the vote and make it a fight on the trail. Tax breaks for the wealthy. Ditto. Lather. Rinse. Repeat! The punchy and feisty Biden we saw last week must formulate a narrative around Republicans’ vision for this country as being out of touch and dangerous.
Lastly, Biden must reconnect with his campaign theme of reducing the chaos and bringing on the competence. The polling at the end of year one shows the President must pay more attention to inflation and do more to get better control of the dreaded COVID virus. While this virus has bedeviled almost everyone, the Administration has seemed all too frequently behind the curve since declaring victory and a return to normalcy last July. Yes, his approval numbers aren’t anywhere near where they need to be in order for Democrats to be successful in November of 2022 and voters are frustrated, but they don’t exclusively blame Biden, so not all is lost.
MURPHY:
I agree with all that. The Dems keep retrying the same ineffective strategy of winning the fight by breaking the other guy's fist with their own face. Take voting rights – remember we are Hacks so put moral outrage aside for a minute as we talk politics – where once again the Dems put up a Senate vote they didn’t have the numbers to win. Maybe the idea was to pump up their voters but the price of that was yet another big loss and a hefty shot of Miracle Grow to the Biden Cannot Win or Deliver A Damn Thing narrative. They could have had the issue to pound on without losing yet another vote. If I were Biden, I’d now move fast to make a bipartisan deal to immediately fix the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which is a pre-Zeppelin era relic so hopelessly vague that in these times it is extremely dangerous. It must go. Biden could get credit for that – much like infrastructure – and go to the country on the rest of the voting rights stuff the Dems want.
GIBBS: Yeah, I agree with the 98% of that. The challenge I think on the electoral college reform is Democrats rightly don’t want to give up on certain larger reforms to capitulate on electoral college reform in order to give McConnell a talking point that somehow he's somehow done election reform. In reality, McConnell and many others would love it if fewer people in America voted.
MURPHY: I get that. It’s the sort of zero sum thinking that currently owns the GOP too. But only the Dems have the big Presidential Bully Pulpit and what Biden leads on, he’ll get the most credit for. Biden could also advocate a simple national absentee ballot reform law. (And take away the inconvenient truth that the absentee ballot laws in several Democratic-run states in the Northeast are more restrictive than those in, wait for it, Georgia.)
Then, on Built Back Better, follow Bill Clinton’s cagey advice and break it up into pieces. Pass what you can, campaign like a banshee on the rest. House Democrats sitting in tough seats want the same strategy. A big problem the D’s have is that many of the Members making the Caucus rules in the House are from districts so true blue that a Democrat can never lose. Instead of focusing their message battle on one or two winning one bumper sticker issues – like Childcare credits – the House Dems have taken all their decent bumper sticker issues from the BBB measure (and a few duds) and rolled them up into one huge, sticky and totally incomprehensible mess. That’s a certain recipe for wiping one’s vulnerable colleagues sitting in swing seats, which means losing the House. Yet they stick with it.
GIBBS:
I think the Administration made a strategically poor decision about two or three months into 2021 after having won the party’s nomination and with it the party’s ideological battle. Instead, of prioritizing making progress on certain issues, it would try to do it all. It was always going to be very difficult to be FDR or LBJ with a 50-50 Senate. If you had said to progressives, “Hey, we're going try to get a trillion dollars to do X,” and we were struggling to get a trillion dollars, it wouldn't seem nearly as disappointing as having people think we could get a $6 trillion or $10 trillion proposal through a 50-50 Senate. Now, they’re paying the price for these decisions with voters and in the media.
MURPHY:
Yeah, well the media will always cover failure unfairly. And yes, the Biden team had a fundamental misinterpretation of why they were elected. People wanted Trump to go away. They wanted some normalcy. They didn't want FDR. Yet, the White House got ambitious and decided they’d change the world. But with not nearly enough votes in Congress, they smashed against the rocks of basic political arithmetic.
GIBBS:
As we talked about, last week was just brutal for this Administration. Unless they misunderstood some in the Senate, they must have known they weren’t going to get a change in filibuster rules and a passage of these voting rights bills. Biden can now say he tried. Remember, folks, it’s the art of the possible. We say this often but the Democrats’ 50th vote represents a state where Joe Biden got 29% of the Presidential vote in 2020. That’s just reality. The reason we say it a lot is it means it's hard for Joe Manchin to vote 90% of the time with Joe Biden. It's just really, really hard. Another challenge is the bully pulpit is not what it used to be with the presidency. You can't convince people into doing stuff they don't want to do or isn't in their political interest with a speech or even several. And that's why we are sort of where we are.
MURPHY:
Yeah, for all their moral superiority, most Democrats Members are acting almost exactly like the Republicans they openly despise: they're so afraid of their activist primary voters, they’re marching off a cliff politically.
IS THE TRUMP TRAIN FALLING OFF THE TRACKS?
MURPHY:
The President gave one of his Bund rallies last week in Arizona and it's increasingly clear to all that he's become so maniacally obsessed with the “stolen” 2016 result that he’s reached a totally insane Captain Queeg level. Even the many platoons of GOP enablers in Trump’s hostage camp are nervous; this is a scary turn even for them. Forget the lawless sedition of it all, for these dedicated cynics the problem is a blitheringly insane they-stole-my-election Trump is a likely loser next time; they miss the old skilled if uneven demagogue they remember from 2016. Trump’s various potential rivals are sensing this and softly scuttling forward toward 2023, mostly for now operating in the shadows. The leading Alt-Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, however, has jumped right out into the sunlight and recently took a public poke at Trump, criticizing him from the right as being way too soft on COVID shutdown policy. Trump, predictably, is irate. This growing scorpion v tarantula barney between Trump and DeSantis is going to be fun to watch, and it’s an early indicator that Trump is slowly weakening. Stay tuned for jungle warfare in the Villages…
GIBBS: Well, Murphy, I continue to watch for amusement, that’s for sure! Pass the popcorn!
TIDBITS:
GIBBS:
You may have missed the big headlines about a big Clinton comeback in 2024. To respond to this simply, it’s just not going to happen.
MURPHY:
Go Hillary go!
We’ll see you on Friday!
Murphy and Gibbs