I’ve been mostly impatient with centrist criticisms of President Biden, but the following from Walter Shapiro hit home. I don’t think it comes close to presenting the full picture, but it has enough solidity to merit discussion.
For months, the president allowed left-wing Democrats to dream of a $3.5 trillion social spending bill, even though there was no plausible route through the Senate. Now that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are still dragging their heels over a downsized $1.75 trillion package, there is a self-destructive sense among Democrats that Biden is a failed president.
The Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that only 44 percent of Democrats strongly approved of his performance as president. Nothing is more enraging than the failure of Democrats to remember that the alternative to Biden is not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. It’s a second act for Donald J. Trump.
I’d like to point out that things would be better if Sens. Manchin and Sinema had been more supportive of Biden’s agenda and shown much greater urgency about seeing it enacted. But it’s true that their resistance was no secret and that the Biden administration could have made this clear much earlier. This would have had two obvious benefits. First, it would have reset expectations at a realistic level so that the eventual package was seen as more of an accomplishment and less of a compromise. Second, all the decisions and deals could have been brokered during the summer rather than stretching through the fall, into winter, and possibly into 2022.
I think there was a failure to manage expectations which probably was one part wishful thinking and one part feeling the need to show some fight for his campaign promises. The Biden administration isn’t getting as much credit as they deserve from the core supporters for refusing to quickly cave to demands of Manchin, Sinema, and the centrist House caucus. Instead, as Shapiro suggests, they’re getting the fruits of disappointment they were trying to avoid.
Faster would have been better even if it came across as weak. The weakness is built into the system and not something that can be finessed away. Likewise, people having unrealistic expectations is baked in the political cake, and the political challenge is to manage the problem because rainbows and ponies won’t change human nature.
The truth is that Democrats should be ecstatic if Biden can convince Congress to invest anything in America. If we can just pay our bills without defaulting, that ought to be considered a minor miracle. People don’t understand how bad things really are, and they blame the people in charge instead of the people causing the problems.
So, yes, Biden’s poll numbers are quite bad, and a big contributor is Democratic unhappiness that’s based on magic thinking. Biden couldn’t wave his hand and makes this go away but he could have prepared people better.
“People don’t understand how bad things really are, and they blame the people in charge instead of the people causing the problems.”
That’s exactly right and it’s the cause of my pessimism. Probably the pessimism most of us feel. All the cards are set up for failure and it feels like the American experiment in self governance is close to collapse. People don’t vote because their cynical about the system and that very cynicism is yet another weight causing the failure. Had Clinton beaten Trump in 2016, we’d likely have had our first liberal Supreme Court in 50 years. So many things would have been possible. Had we gotten two more seats this last cycle — let’s say Virginia and Maine — things would look so different. Even then, however, we’d be perilously close to collapse because one party has become a 5th Column of traitors and the press pretends we’re living in some other universe, one that may have existed years ago.
Biden leaned into the progressive agenda and it turns out that politically speaking, progressives are paper tigers. They don’t have the votes and their agenda is not what the American people wanted. I think voters wanted stability and calm and a restoration of normalcy. I don’t think many voters really signed on to a massive expansion of the safety net. I wish they had, but they didn’t.
Now progs are furious at Biden for failing to do what they couldn’t do. It’s childish – literally, in the sense that children imagine Mom and Dad can do anything if they really want to. Progressives, who can’t win an election outside of a district that’s D+20, are full of impossible demands, and when their proposals crash and burn, they blame Dad for not magicking up a pony for Christmas.
I don’t necessarily disagree with Shapiro, or with you, Martin but I think this is one of those situations where there’s no obviously correct course of action for a politician in Biden’s position. Take an opposing view, for example:
1) American voters like optimism and they like winners. Imagine if Biden had spent the past 8 months conveying a Carter-like realism to Democratic voters. Would they have appreciated his realism and adjusted their expectations downward while remaining enthusiastic supporters of him and his party? Or would they have turned their anger away from Manchin and Sinema and onto Biden for refusing to fight hard enough for the agenda he campaigned on?
2) That leads to a related point: partisan voters like politicians who are fighters. As it stands now, Biden has fought the good fight on the “Build Back Better” bill and he’s won on the bipartisan infrastructure law. If (and it looks like a big “if” right now) he delivers Manchin and Sinema for some version of a $1.75 trillion energy/climate/childcare/healthcare bill, and if Pelosi can hold together her caucus to vote for the Senate bill, then there’s a decent chance Biden goes into 2022 looking like a fighter *and* a winner.
3) Democrats were *always* going to face an uphill struggle in 2022, even if Biden were Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ all wrapped together in one. The best chance Democrats have is if voters go to the polls next fall with unemployment around 4%, GDP growing at more than 3%, real wages rising at around 5%, the nation at (relative) peace, and the pandemic under control. With what Biden’s done so far this year, there’s a decent chance of that happening.
Final, non-governing point: Filling the next year with indictments, trials, and (where proven) convictions of Trump, his family, his companies, and his allies would, I suspect, help Dems politically too, but that’s largely out of their hands (and in the hands of prosecutors at Main DOJ, EDNY, SDNY, New York AG, Fulton County DA, Westchester County DA, and Manhattan DA’s offices.
I think you make excellent points. Speed is one thing you didn’t address, however. I think forcing Manchin and Sinema to draw their lines much earlier would have allowed Biden to pivot off his promises quickly and get to the end game, where Manchin and Sinema would have still been the bad guys.
Agreed. The passage of the American Rescue Plan (March 11, two months after it was introduced) was a model of this. Manchin even got to go on Fox News, proclaim it a great centrist victory, and do so without any real pushback(!).
Your point also applies in other areas: we urgently need more speed in the various investigations—both Congressional and legal—into Trump, his family, his company, and his allies.
My perspective is that the Biden Administration inherited a mess left by TFG. By the time he took the Oath of Office, we were only a couple weeks removed from a nearly successful coup attempt. Add to that the lack of any processes to handle just about any function of government as they had been trashed during the previous four years. We were going to have COVID-19 vaccine supply but apparently logistics in place to get shots into arms, at a time when the pandemic was raging out of control enough to make some dystopias seem like probably realities. The economy was a mess because that is what happens with pandemics. The Afghanistan withdrawal had been negotiated before he began his term, and again his team had to figure out how to do the heavy lifting without the processes in place to get out of Dodge orderly. His administration has to govern with the slimmest majorities imaginable. The stimulus bill from early this year and the recent infrastructure bill were both big effing deals. The jury’s still out on the BBB, but Biden’s been pulling a few rabbits out of his hat all during his first year. I’m not writing that off as of yet. I don’t look for perfection. I look for good enough. We’ve seen a lot of good enough. For a while I questioned if we’d ever experience that again.
I am not going to pretend to read the minds of the average American voter. I’m not sure how to. I’m a political junkie. The impression I get though is that those who voted for Biden wanted a return to some sense of normality and hope that we still had it in us to do better. Someone who comes in with an optimistic demeanor, who seems to really mean it, well that’s pretty infectious. There’s nothing normal about 2021, but the image of a President who just does the job (along with the various Cabinet members) is a relief, at least to me. I’d rather someone make optimistic projections, fall a bit short, but still have something to show for it than nothing at all. That something has directly impacted my family. We got by thanks to another round of stimulus and those child tax credit checks each month (relevant for another year, and why I hang onto hope for BBB getting passed). If I had any advice to Biden and anyone even remotely connected to the Democratic Party’s communication apparatus it is this: Talk simply and concretely about how the efforts of this last year have helped. Focus on those of us who have been largely forgotten (and we turn out to be a diverse bunch). Keep us enthusiastic. Show us how things could be better, but what it would take to make that actually happen. Biden can’t just decree what we want. He has to have a Congress he can work with and Courts that won’t entirely get in his way. And while we’re at it, messaging needs to focus on just how far we’ve come, given the mess we were left with. Employment is getting close to pre-pandemic levels. The pandemic is still with us for a while longer, but we have some idea that the pandemic will end within months. The US is no longer in the business of nation building (a relief to me, as I have personal friends who’ve done multiple tours in Afghanistan). The folks I serve who often don’t have access to decent internet access are about to have that access, and with it the ability to complete degrees and credentials online, promote startups in their communities, etc. For all the turmoil (which is real) we can see the promise of a better future. That will at least get me to continue to get up in the morning. Right now, I need that. Admittedly that is selfish.
One of the problems Biden faces is that the newsroom at the Washington Post no longer has Marty Baron as Editor, and the new person has them continually putting out negative articles with negative headlines. Just a couple of days ago a headline took Biden to task for not being gloomy enough … on the day he signed the infrastructure bill. Eric Boehlert has been all over the problem with the Post. Washington Post hits Biden for not being gloomy enough – by Eric Boehlert – PRESS RUN