Reversing Political Hysteria
The Biden administration needs to tell a better story about itself, and do so more forcefully
Readers, I don’t know what I am doing right, but the readership numbers for last month were—astonishingly high. New subscriptions are roaring. I’m delighted—and would love to hear more in the comments section about what you like or dislike in a post to learn from you. And thanks for forwarding these posts. Would you mind continuing to:
All the best newspapers are full of the horror that supposedly awaits Democrats in 2024. We are told, for example, that suburban white women, enraged about public schools closing during the pandemic (while many private schools remained open), want to punish every Democratic politician they can vote against—whether those politicians were involved in school policy or not.
OK, suburban white women are unreliable and a little Trumpy anyway—but what of the vaunted Democratic “base”?
Well, it appears they are unhappy too. Centrists and traditional liberals are mad because they think the progressive agenda is alienating independents. Progressives are mad, so sayeth Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because Joe Biden has not “delivered” on his “talking points.” That said, you do have to wonder what she thinks she could accomplish by spending as much time talking to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have.
But progressives are always mad about something, right? It’s the essence of being progressive. So even if you get something you want, you can only celebrate for five minutes because you need to get mad about something else to maintain your progressive credentials. And maybe I wasn’t listening, but did anyone promise socialism in the first year of the Biden administration?
But, we are told, it isn’t just the progressives: no Democrat on earth is happy! Even though “President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and mov[ed] a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House,” as the New York Times tells us,
some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.
As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.
Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.
The iceberg, our liberal media warns us ominously, is even bigger below the waterline.
But wait. Is it true that things haven’t gotten better than they were under Trump? Are there so many people who voted for Joe Biden who are now willing, after ten months, to give up? Do they really want to turn the country over to Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and—oh dear God, Donald Trump or whatever empty ideological suit the GOP runs in his place in 2024? Is that how Virginia moms think they will get better schools—by putting Betsy DeVos back in the Department of Education?
Give me a break.
Think what Republicans would do in this situation: they would tell their voters that everything was great. They did that for four years, and some of them are still doing it. This is why over 775,000 Americans are dead of Covid-19 as of today, the worst public health record in the industrialized world.
But even as this disaster was unrolling, Republicans were told it would be fine to live in an alternative reality. “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” Donald Trump said on February 26, 2020, right before everything went to sh*t. “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!” he tweeted on April 6, as deaths passed 10,000. “It will go away like things go away,” he said on August 6, as deaths surged past 160,000.
You get the message. But incredibly, so did his voters, who rushed to the polls in even greater numbers than they had in 2016.
The thing is, the Biden administration’s actual reality is pretty good, and a little more happy talk would correspond with real achievements that help real people. Here are a few things I have noticed.
The biggest drug bust in two years: 20,000 pounds of methamphetamine and fentanyl that would have otherwise ended up in working people’s bodies, was seized at the San Diego border crossing. Progressives should be holding a press conference thanking the Biden administration for keeping this poison out of their communities.
Midwifed by the Biden administration, Samsung Electronics builds a $17 billion semiconductor plant in Taylor, Texas. If Time, which reported this story, functioned as a conservative news outlet, the headline would be: "Biden administration brings jobs, semiconductor plant to Texas to secure supply chain, counter China ambitions."
In the absence of comprehensive student loan forgiveness, the Biden administration has been using its power to cancel existing student loans, something I have seen zero publicity about. I twigged to this because I started seeing posts on Twitter by people who have been paying for decades and barely made a dent in their principle whose loans have vanished. At least one got money back because the massive interest she had paid was credited to the original loan balance. It was, as she said, “life-changing.”
What am I not counting? The hundreds of mean-spirited Trump Executive Orders that Biden has reversed, the restoration of National Parks, and the fact that we no longer live in fear every day of some new cockamamie scheme coming out of the White House.
Democrats, pull yourself together. No, we don’t have socialism yet—but life is improving.
Short takes:
The New York Times’ Sarah Wildman gets specific about why fetal heartbeat laws trade women’s lives for the lives of unviable fetuses. “In the United States, with Roe v. Wade likely to be largely dismantled, if not overturned, next year,” Wildman writes, in a powerful call to tell the stories of women who died because doctors withheld the procedure, “it is time to look again at the women whose lives — and deaths — changed how the public understands what’s at stake when we talk about banning abortion.” (November 29, 2021)
Is it possible to feel better about the new Covid-19 variant? Apparently yes. According to Don McNeil, formerly a science reporter at the New York Times, while we still don’t know much about Omicron (best name ever! Makes me want to go get a new kitten and name her Omicron), we know this: “We now have two pills that probably will work against all new variants.” You have to read it to learn why. (November 29, 2021)
Is it an accident that Mormons are some of the best-organized people in America and that the Deseret News is pitching “one-stop shopping” for government benefits? I don’t know. But this article by Robin Fretwell Wilson, Elsa Zawedde, and Becca Valek points out what we have known for decades: welfare is confusing and hard to access. People eligible for it might make better use of federal programs designed to be used in tandem if applying for benefits was accessible and straightforward. In partnership with the LDS Church (not exactly a bastion of pro-government progressive thinking), state officials are already doing it in Salt Lake City (November 25, 2020)
Reversing Political Hysteria
As of 8:51 pm, typos are fixed :-)
As an aging man, I'm not in a hurry to underscore this too much, but honestly, I do wonder if Biden is entirely up to telling its better story in terms of what it can ask its central titular figure to do. I also don't think he's ever been a particularly strong figure in those terms--his strengths, such as they are, have been in building mostly-male relationships of affinity and trust with peers.
I also am not sure how much better the story can be when the people who would carry forth the story are not terribly invested in it being better. You can feel how much more comfortable the press is in the role of second-guessing a conventional Washington establishment than it was under Trump--even if that conventional role opens the door again to what they claim to have opposed.