Glimmerings

Via.

Jeff Greenfield in Politico's magazine ("The Democrats Need a Reality Check") laid it out in pretty grim terms: President Biden can't be FDR in 1933, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, because he doesn't have the votes in the Senate: a majority as thin as a razor blade and no cooperation from anybody in the opposition party. He thinks expanding the Supreme Court is a terrible idea (don't know if he's aware the Lincoln administration did that in 1863, adding a tenth justice in the hope of hemming in the vile chief justice Roger Taney) and getting rid of the filibuster is bad too; the John Lewis and For the People acts can't pass, and even if they could wouldn't solve the problem of state legislatures claiming authority to overturn national election. The only hope for Democrats, Greenfield concludes, is to find a way to "win more"—in "messaging", apparently, like by announcing every day that they want Jeff Bezos to start paying his fair share in taxes, an overwhelmingly popular idea with the American public. But it's difficult, because of the "political climate":

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for “defunding the police” can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness. (It’s one key reason why Trump gained among Black and brown voters, and why Democrats lost 13 House seats.)

Which, as Steve points out, is a problem Republicans (and bothsider journalists) have actively worked to create:

Greenfield writes as if the fact that "inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues" is something that just ... happened. It didn't. It happened because right-wingers shouted in unison about these issues until the mainstream media declared them to be "dominant issues," which made a lot of mainstream voters believe they are "dominant issues." And the same is true with "defunding the police," which remains a top issue primarily because right-wingers won't stop talking about it and because the mainstream media continues to hang it around the necks of all Democrats, even the ones who don't advocate it....

Can't somebody in the Democratic Party work harder on Democratic (and anti-Republican) messaging? And aren't there ways of being aggressive without being ignorant or thuggish in the manner of Trump?

I don't know what the right style would be. But Democrats can't "just win more" doing only what they're doing now.

Well, except maybe one thing—the other thing politicians do, in addition to messaging, which is making people's lives different, as with the expanded child tax credit. which is going to start landing in parents' mailboxes on Thursday in the form of checks for up to $300 per child ($250 for kids over 6), the first in a series that will go on for the next six months, for half the total amount, while the other half will come next summer as a federal tax refund. Under the provisions of the American Rescue Act, passed in March under reconciliation rules, without, as I'm sure you will remember, a single Republican vote.

That might be a good thing to include in the daily messaging, and it's not all (for one thing, if you're in a heavier taxpaying bracket, you might like to know you can now claim up to $16,000 in childcare as a deduction in next year's returns). 

I wasn't crazy about it in January, but the Warnock and Ossoff campaigns won in Georgia less by saying that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad than by promising those $1400 "stimulus" checks. It may not have been the best policy idea, but it was the right rhetorical track.

In the course of the next few weeks, as bipartisan committees thrash out the details of the coming infrastructure plan, while certain self-denominated "leftists" are devoting themselves to complaining that it doesn't have any environmental protections (it's actually got quite a bit, including funding for public transit, electric school buses, and half a million electric vehicle chargers, plugging 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells, and $47 billion for "resilience" against climate change and cyber attacks), Democrats alone will be working on the next reconciliation bill, covering the parts Republicans don't want to vote for, which will include tons of stuff about mitigating global warming.

Which will pass, again, without a single Republican vote (but with Manchin and Sinema, who have signed on, trust me). And it will also include an extension of that child tax credit.

And it will also include serious increases in the amount of taxes Jeff Bezos has to pay.

And it will also include universal pre-K.

It's true that Roosevelt and Johnson had easier circumstances for passing bills, which worked to the former's advantage more than the latter's—FDR's economic rescue plan was a lot more popular than LBJ's civil rights plan, sadly. Democrats have a way to pass an extraordinarily popular bill, and without Republican support. 

Incidentally, who decreed that "inflation, crime, and immigration are dominant issues"? Not Gallup last month, I don't think:

Immigration, high, is clearly declining rapidly from its peak in April, and crime and inflation are just about nowhere. The press has blown up these Republican talking points into monsters, but they don't seem to have caught on, in fact, with the public (crime and the police defunding played an important role in the New York City mayoral primary this month, but  not with winners Eric Adams and Manhattan DA candidate Alvin Bragg using a Republican line—both demanded reform just short of "defunding", which is what the voters wanted). What's overwhelmingly at the top is government leadership, which, I think, is a response to government's perceived inability to do anything for anybody, which we are learning day by day is less of a problem with the Biden Democrats than has often been the case, at least in their response to Covid-19 (that's part of why the dangerousness of Covid has declined so radically in the Gallup survey), and probably in the handling of the "stimulus" as well.

The best argument for the 2022 election (and the passage of the John Lewis and For the People Acts and the reduction of the filibuster too, which Manchin has started looking more and more interested in) is going to be not on the issue of how Democrats are good and Republicans are bad—everybody knows that already, and, frankly, 40% of the public or more has decided they like bad. It ought to be on the question of whether Democrats can do things, and there's at least a very good chance that we will prove we can. By "winning more" not for the party but for the public. It's a clever strategy, too, in that Republicans will never believe it can work ("You're going to—teeheehee—win elections by offering good government? Adorable!").

It's a bit soon to start messaging this every day now—it's better to stay cool until the bills themselves come out in August—but let's talk about that $3600 that's in the pipeline right now, at least, and the bridges and tunnels and highways too. There will be more to say soon, in any case. There is a pathway to making it through 2022 and passing the voting rights legislation as well, and it goes through here.