President Biden remarked yesterday: “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.”
Oy veh.
He wants to trust his fate to his fellow Democrats? Good luck. That crowd on Capitol Hill couldn’t find their own tushes even if they had maps of the human anatomy.
How hard should it be to spin a win out of the latest Build Back Better framework? Granted, it’s half the size of the originally proposed pie-in-the-sky Biden plan that was never going to pass anyway. But it just so happens that $1.8 trillion for universal pre-kindergarten, an extended/expanded child tax credit, child care for working parents, financial help for people buying Obamacare coverage, Medicare coverage for people with hearing problems, money for home health care, money for the construction of a million affordable housing units, half a trillion bucks to fight climate change by spurring clean energy production…all that and more would be the biggest federal investment in everyday lives since the New Deal.
Alas, a sizeable number of Dems prefer to whine about what’s been excised, and, yes, it’s definitely regrettable that paid family leave, free college tuition, government-negotiated lower drug prices, and higher taxes on billionaires have been shelved in order to appease “centrists” Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. But what all Dems should do, if they truly have any interest in retaining control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms, is three-fold:
*Recognize the reality that half a loaf, especially a huge loaf, is way better than nothing. It’s called political compromise, a tradition that dates back to the Founding Fathers.
*Turn the framework into a final bill for Biden’s signature, and campaign relentlessly about all the good stuff they’ve managed to enact despite having the thinnest possible majorities.
*Remind voters that these crucial reforms were achieved despite the universal opposition of the Republican cult in Congress – which has demonstrated, yet again, that it has zero interest in helping families and children, or people who need affordable health coverage, or the planet that’s burning before our eyes.
If anyone had predicted at the start of the year – when a twin win in the Georgia Senate races seemed impossible, when indeed it seemed set in stone that the GOP would keep the Senate – that today we’d be on the cusp of passing an ambitious $1.8-trillion economic and social policy plan, such a scenario would’ve sounded nuts. After all, Biden wasn’t taking office with the kind of clout that Lyndon B. Johnson had on the Hill after his ’64 landslide presidential win. At the time Medicare was enacted in 1965, the Democrats held 295 of the 435 House seats, and 68 of the 100 Senate seats.
So today’s Dems should smarten up and sell the hell out of what they’ve managed to (almost) achieve. Senator Dick Durbin got it right yesterday when he said, “Some people look at the donut and just see the hole. This donut is substantial.” Senator Chris Murphy concurred, “The focus should be on what’s in, not what’s out.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand concurred, “Even though everyone had things they really wanted in, and there’s many things that aren’t included, there’s so many things that are transformative.”
What you do is, you sell that half a loaf, then you campaign against the obstructionist GOP in order to win more seats and pass the reforms that didn’t make it this time. You give the Democratic base an affirmative reason to turn out en masse in 2022, by pointing out that if the party wins more Senate seats (starting with Pennsylvania’s open race), it won’t need to go hat in hand to Joe Manchin anymore.
But for now, they should take what they can get. As LBJ himself once said, “Any man who’s not willing to take half a loaf in a negotiation, well, that man never went to bed hungry.”