Don’t worry, the politically acute and uniquely qualified President Joe Biden will turn things around any minute for Democrats. He’ll make a humble pivot to the center, call Sen. Joe Manchin in to help negotiate on better terms and work with the overlap of both parties to accomplish some unifying part of his domestic agenda.
Democrats have lived in that pipedream for six months now while Biden’s approval rating continues dropping and their chances of retaining the House and Senate continue to fade.
Politico now reports that “despair” has set in. Yes, they use the term “despair” to describe the feeling among Democrats that if they don’t get some part of Biden’s agenda passed by mid-May, they’re politically done until the midterms in November:
With the clock ticking on their hopes of clinching a major climate and deficit reduction deal before Memorial Day, Democratic leaders are again struggling to make progress — stymied by a lack of clear direction or an understanding of what both Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), their two biggest obstacles, are prepared to support.
“The White House is hamstrung by the Venn diagram of Manchin and Sinema asks,” said a person familiar with Manchin and White House dynamics.
Currently, informal reconciliation talks center on three major areas: climate change, prescription drug reform and deficit reduction. While the White House has yet to acknowledge other social spending elements have been moved off the table, multiple people familiar with the talks said President Joe Biden’s ambitions on child and elder care are all but dead.
But even getting a slimmed-down reconciliation package through the evenly divided Senate will depend solely on Biden’s ability to get Manchin and Sinema to yes. And seven months after the White House first tried to crack the Manchinema puzzle last September, it’s clear little has changed.
If only Politico and other mainstream outlets would recognize the “despair” that Americans are living in under Biden’s failures. There’s plenty of real-world despair to be found rather than the political despair of losing an upcoming election.
Why does it seem so impossible for Democrats to negotiate among themselves between Biden, Manchin, Sinema, and Pelosi? Is it that Pelosi doesn’t want to cede them the power? Is it that Manchin doesn’t want to start negotiating from some absurd trillion-dollar price tag? Is Sinema tired of being harassed by her own party? Maybe the problem is that Joe Biden himself doesn’t know which way is up.
It truly seems like a hot mess of competing egos and agendas between the Democratic-controlled House, Senate, and White House. None of them seem to be able to get on the same page even to pass one-tenth of Biden’s domestic agenda.
Pelosi and the House seem to want everything or nothing. Manchin and Sinema have offered concessions, but much smaller packages than the House. Biden’s team seems feckless to negotiate its way out of a paper bag.
Speaking of feckless, back to the Politico article:
There has been a hesitancy, people familiar with the process said, for the president to directly engage with the Manchin for fear that he could come out looking feckless. Even if the two were to ramp up formal negotiations, there’s no guarantee the senator would agree to a deal.
Ya don’t say? They’re afraid to send Biden into the negotiating room because he might lack the initiative and character to properly negotiate? If Biden is unable to negotiate on good terms with members of his own party because his team is afraid he can’t do it, who is running the country?
Every time we touch on this topic of moving Biden’s dead domestic agenda, Democrats just need a “few more days” to make something happen. Those days come and go, and nothing happens. Will nothing happen again?
Yet privately, top Democrats view the next several days as critical to determining whether there’s any chance of passing the kind of centerpiece legislation capable of giving a jolt to the party’s midterm prospects. There is growing paranoia that Manchin, in recently engaging in bipartisan talks, is either willfully or unknowingly allowing Republicans to run out the clock on any reconciliation package that Democrats could agree to among themselves.
The White House has resigned itself to negotiating a far smaller bill than Biden envisioned last April, when he first pitched a multitrillion-dollar plan addressing a range of top domestic issues.
The next several days are always crucial, critical, or vital and Democrats have blown it up every single time since Biden was inaugurated. Pelosi screws it, Schumer screws it, Manchin screws it, or Biden screws it, take your pick. It’s like a drinking game of guessing which Democrat will firebomb the next round of legislative talks.
Democrats controlling the House, Senate, and the White House has yielded nothing of value for the base of the party looking for big vast new entitlements or “green new deal” type of legislation.
Next up on the agenda of failure? Student loan forgiveness, a proposal popular among people with student loans, and wildly unpopular with the rest of the country who either repaid their loans as scheduled or never took them out to begin with.
