Friday, March 29

The Biden administration is in shambles. It’s not entirely your fault | bear nwanevu


TO year of his term, the Biden administration is in shambles. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s support for legislative filibuster has killed the campaign for Democratic voting rights. Biden’s Build Back Better plan, a massive reconciliation package containing initiatives on issues ranging from climate change to childcare, is dead in the water for now; Manchin and Sinema will determine if any of its provisions survive in attenuated form.

Immigration reform and health care reform, both central to Democratic intrapartisan debates during the 2020 primaries, have completely dropped off the radar. The US Supreme Court may overturn Roe v Wade in the coming months. The latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the country thanks not only to Covid deniers and vaccine skeptics on the right, but also to an administration that has struggled to keep its promises to make testing easier. . Abroad, Biden’s courageous withdrawal from Afghanistan ⁠ – a promise kept that even the president’s harshest critics on the left were willing to believe ⁠ – has been marred by economic sanctions that have left 23 million Afghans without enough to eat, and the media is already eager to blame Biden for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

None of this is to say that Biden’s first year in office was devoid of real accomplishments or positive press. But neither the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act nor the American Bailout ⁠– the president’s two major legislative victories so far⁠– have resonated with the electorate. Biden now has the second lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his term ⁠; the record is still held by his predecessor Donald Trump.

It’s clear from the polls that voters are blaming Biden for inflation and an alleged inattention to the economy. But high inflation has been a global phenomenon ⁠ – and here, one of the proximate causes has been the strength of an economic recovery fueled by the US Bailout. Indeed, Biden has focused on the economy to the exclusion of almost everything else on the Democratic agenda ⁠ – his recent turn to voting rights came only after the collapse of negotiations over the Build Back Better plan which, in his initial form, was easily one of the most ambitious economic packages ever proposed in Washington.

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Messaging on the plan has clearly not worked. The main individual components of Build Back Better are much more popular than the overall package ⁠ – at the end of last year, Politico and Morning Consult found that 47% of registered voters supported it, while increasing funding for affordable housing and expanding Medicaid to cover hearing services saw 65% and 75% support, respectively. That’s not terribly surprising given that voters have probably heard much more about the difficulty of negotiating the plan in Congress than about the substance of the plan.

While Manchin and Sinema bear most of the blame for this, some commentators have also criticized Biden himself for over-promising his legislative agenda and deviating from the centrism he was known for. “The president must remember that he won as a moderate and a unifier,” Bret Stephens of the New York Times. warned on Tuesday. “Biden had better move on from defeat and craft legislation with bipartisan appeal.” But as these critics well know, there is very little on which both parties still agree, and even the most modest bipartisan proposals, such as universal gun background checks, have been doomed to failure by legislative filibuster, which forces the 50-member Democratic caucus to win over not just a few, but at least 10 Republicans to pass anything outside of budget reconciliation.

Both Biden supporters and his centrist critics have an interest in presenting him as a visionary. But it is not: the expanded agenda that centrists disdain has been the product of internal party pressure and the magnitude of our economic and public health crisis. There is plenty of evidence that Biden still favors moderation and restraint, especially on executive administration action and, on certain issues, executive inaction ⁠ – there, the White House has spent the year frustrating party activists on issues including student debt, immigration, and surveillance.

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However, it is true that Biden has made a lot of extravagant and little analyzed promises. Like his campaign, Biden’s inaugural address last year focused less on defending a specific set of policies than defending Joe Biden as our spiritual savior. “Today, on this day in January,” he told the crowd, “my whole soul is in this: to bring America together, to bring our people together, and to bring our nation together.”

Here, Biden’s failure should be obvious even to Americans who don’t closely follow the news. The tenor of the political debate has not softened; our substantive political divisions remain just as deep. The notion that American unity was within Biden’s ability to achieve was simply a lie ⁠ – one of many he has told about the state of our country and where it is headed. During the campaign, he assured voters that the GOP would reach an epiphany and develop a willingness to work broadly with Democrats once Trump left the White House. In what amounted to outright mocking that claim, Mitt Romney ⁠–widely praised in the press and within the Democratic Party as one of the GOP’s last voices of reason⁠– compared Biden’s advocacy of electoral reform to the Trump’s post-election shenanigans earlier this month. . “President Biden is following the same tragic path that President Trump has taken,” he said in a speech in the US Senate, “casting doubt on the reliability of American elections.”

In his press conference on Wednesday, Biden insisted that he had no idea he would face this kind of nonsense and opposition from the right. Believing him does not give credit to his intelligence. This was another lie, one uttered to further the strategy Democrats generally resort to when they’re down ⁠– projecting outrage at Republican obstruction while hoping, in this case, that voters don’t realize that the Democratic Party controls the government and can approve anything. I always like that the party is unified.

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Biden’s current position gives us reason to doubt that this will work in the November midterms. So does electoral history ⁠ – incumbent parties tend to do poorly in them. None of that routine flux, the product of what political scientists call “thermostatic public opinion,” has produced the significant change that many frustrated Americans hope to bring about at the polls. Inequality and corporate power are growing. Decades of poor rhetoric and policy have failed to make meaningful progress on issues ranging from health care to education. And both immediate crises like the coronavirus pandemic and long-term challenges like climate change seem beyond our ability to address.

This impotence has been the product of our institutions and the myths that sustain faith in them. Biden has taken a belated and tentative interest in rewriting the Senate rules; the opposition of Manchin and Sinema and the electoral biases of our system have not only stymied their agenda, but also ensured that the Democrats will not be able to rule alone in Washington for many years if they lose their ruling majority in November. .

It is not obvious that Biden can do anything to save the party from that fate. But it is clear what moral leadership demands of him now. Our federal order is strangling us. I should say it. He should also admit that conflict and disagreement will always define American society. There is no other future available to a country as large, diverse and nominally free as ours. And the achievements we are most proud of today ⁠– from women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement ⁠– simply would not have been possible had leaders limited their aspirations to goals that “united Americans.” Naturally, there’s not a chance in hell that something like that would pass from Biden’s lips. It’s not smart and it’s not safe. But it’s the truth, and the American people deserve to hear it from someone one day.


www.theguardian.com

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