This is one of the reasons that I keep watching MSNBC for my political news. They are not shy about bringing on traditional GOP conservatives like Michael Steele, George Conway, David Jolly, Carlos Curbelo, and even my Mick cousin Mike Murphy. And because they never drank the Trump Kool-Aid, they assess situations dispassionately from the GOP side. And it adds a necessary perspective to the discussion.
Tonight, it was Mike Murphy’s turn to knock my socks off. On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, they were discussing Biden’s road trip strategy to push the benefits of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the effect of his falling poll numbers. And Murphy gave a response that blew me away. Roughly paraphrased, he said;
The Democrats shouldn’t be surprised by Biden’s numbers. Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans elected him for one reason. To return a form of stability to the government after 4 years of Trump’s insanity. And instead of stability and function, they get a Democratic House full of howler monkeys running around fighting with each other and the Senate. That isn’t what people voted for.
And you know what? Murphy nailed it right on the head. Recent polling shows that the majority of the country feels that Biden has accomplished little or nothing for the American people! Biden passed another Covid stimulus package, ramped up vaccinations, and got the economy back up and running again. The Department of Labor just admitted that their numbers for the last three months were seriously fucked up, and we added more than 650,000 jobs that were previously unaccounted for. And yet, Biden doesn’t get the credit. Why?
Because of the penny ante, petty pissing contest between House progressives and Senate moderates like Manchin and Sinema over the size of the progressives Build Back Better Plan. In the last five years, how often have Republicans complained and moaned that Trump’s petulance and spotlight hogging stomped all over positive accomplishments for the administration? And now, Biden’s own congress did exactly the same thing to him!
This is the cautionary tale that the Democrat’s must take forward going into 2022. Exit polling showed that most independent and soft GOP voters went fir Biden for a return to normalcy and stability. And the first thing that the Democrats give them is another Animal House food fight. And they’re voting with their feet.
Look, it should be simple from here. Both the Democratic House and Senate agree on 90% of the Build Back Better Plan. The House progressives need to quit dicking around and just pass the damn bill onto the Senate. They know that the Senate is going to trim the sails on the bill, but eventually they’ll pass it. Let the process play out behind the scenes, don’t make any stupid public statements, and pass what the Senate sends back. Show the kind of goddamn party unity and resolve that the voters voted for in the first place.
A week is a lifetime in politics. There is just under a year left to the midterms, more than enough time since the GOP seems hell bent on culture war self destruction. But the Democrats have to come together in order to show the voters that they are capable of governing. As they say in Hollywood, What have you done for me lately, baby?
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So, to minimize apparent dissension we should just do what Manchin and Sinema want?
I don’t think that the vast majority of already surveyed voters would approve of that, since Biden’s original proposals were getting 60-80% support for policies that are, don’t forget, broadly in line with ALL other Western type economies.
Doing what DINOs want is not implementing the policies of the Democratic Party I, and the vast majority of others, support.
We want proper Democratic policies that benefit the most people, not Republican-light policies that benefit the rich and the corpulent corporates.
??????
The players may change but the song remains the same.
Every FN time Dems get control of the reigns of power in the WH and Congress, Bigtentitis bites us in the ass yet again. The Dem party is basically a group who believe in a common cause with completely different ideas on how to achieve their goals. The progressive branch doesn’t seem to realize that an idea that has full support in safe districts in NY or Washington State ( yes, looking at you AOC & Squad and Jaypal) won’t fly in more conservative battleground areas like Virginia, and the same can be said of conservatives. (Yes, looking at you Sinema and Manchin)
While the Dems fight and wallow in the mud pit, the Repubs get their unified marching orders, slip on their jackboots and say “Look at them….nothing is getting done……only WE can fix this.”, and goose step their way back into power.
Once there, the people realize the Repubs have no clue as to what they are doing other than appointing incompetent or fascist judges or tax breaks for the rich and and the pendulum swings back to the Dem side…….wash, rinse, repeat into infinity.
Except of course, that polls in those districts show that people support what is in the BBB.
Yes, the support was overwhelming in the bloodbath experienced in Virginia losing the Governorship, the Lt. Governorship, the Atty. General position AND the House of Delegates….and if the Senate were on the ballot, we would have lost that too.
Build Back Better is but a piece of the equation.
trump and the republicans held all three chambers, by bigger margins in 2016 than Dems have now. They passed nothing in 2 years except the tax cut, infrastructure week anyone? Bueler..Bueler? Biden has passed many legislative bills and it is still early. The covid economy still dominates and that will be a headwind that Biden will have to deal with. I don’t think any single bill is gong to make a difference, people just need the feeling that things are getting better. We do have a normal government now, contentious as always. Just look at Fox noise, have they really been able to create any outrage about the administration that is not full of crooks and thieves like the previous one was. Normal capable people are in charge of things. That stability will start to pay off as competence in government resumes.
Yes, let all the people who voted in the Democrats “[t]o return a form of stability to the government after 4 years of Trump’s insanity” waddle back to the GOP. Or are they not looking at THAT bunch of idiots who have done almost nothing but their usual routine of “obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.”
Four years of Trump and the GOP *promising* to do something about the country’s infrastructure–and what did they produce? Tax cuts for billionaires and a GOP that played utterly subservient to Trump and putting 2 UNQUALIFIED people on the Supreme Court (Gorsuch seems to be the only one who actually seems to have half a clue about the job). If these whiny little shitstains can’t deal with Democrats “running around fighting with each other and the Senate,” then let them get the GOP they so obviously seem to want. There has not been a SINGLE thing that the House and Senate GOP produced in the last 30 years that actually benefited ordinary people.
I was glad to hear Brian Williams announce he’s leaving MSNBC at the end of the month. I’m sick of his Dem-bashing, his negatively slanted questions to guests, too many of who go along and don’t call him out, his Republican-lite attitude, the mealy-mouthed, snide remarks, and his continual mouthing of repuQ talking points. What he doesn’t focus on enough is all the fronts the Dems are battling on. We have our hands full and get nearly no help from the other party. How about bashing the repuQs for a change? They did NOTHING for four years for God’s sake! Nothing other than a tax break for the rich. Anyway, good riddance. I hope they replace him with someone with a bit more perspective (and not his repuQ lite girlfriend, Nicole Wallace!). And maybe by getting rid of him we won’t have to suffer through listening to that idiot James Carville still bitching about ‘defunding the police’ after all this time. And while I’m at it, I’d like to say that I’ve also had it with the finger-pointing at ‘The Squad’ on this site, Murph, blaming the progressives for not getting things done. Lay the blame for that shit at the door of Sinema and Manchin. They are being well paid to represent the wishes of their rich donors, to keep Biden from accomplishing his goals. There is a lot of dark money out there propagandizing against Dems, hammering away at progressive values and legislation. Some of the ads I see, even on MSNBC, are harbingers of things to come, and it doesn’t look promising. So we need to keep perspective and not add to the circular firing squad. There’s going to be enough of that as it is. We don’t need it here.
Hear, hear!
Sometimes I feel that elected Democrats are actually part of a single entity – one of those people who have a regular life and a secret life where they don a costume and assumed identity like superheroes do.
I’d be down with that, except Democrat’s “superpower” seems to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
You’ve written plenty of compelling stuff about how a road paved with gold was all laid out and Biden was leading us down it towards the promised land – legislation that was hugely popular and even had majority support in GOP places (that’s in response to another commenter btw) and would start showing benefits by early next year, just in time for the primaries had it been passed both as proposed and when it SHOULD have.
Instead we have a handful of folks on Capitol Hill that fervently believe that Democrats HAVE to piss off there Party’s base AND the majority of voters to gain crossover votes from Republicans. Even if that’s true in a handful of cases, the good of the country (and when talking about climate change) is worth risking the wrath of one’s voters. If someone is unable to make the case that their vote was principled and the correct one for the good of their constituents (the regular folks – not the rich donor class) then they have little chance of winning. Those voters they are so convinced are the keys to the kingdom have a nasty tendency to, when given a choice between an unabashed conservative Republican and a GOP-Lite Democrat who spend more time justifying voting the way the GOP would like than their own Party likes have a strong tendency to LOSE re-election. Oh, they might get away with it for a bit but in the end, they become FORMER Senators and Representatives. I’m talking about people like YOU Claire McKaskill. They set themselves up to lose. Voters, especially Republicans don’t like wishy-washy. They might not like votes on various stuff by their elected folks whether it’s progressive or conservative BUT they respect those who make it clear they are by god doing what they believe is the best thing to do.
Manchin, who has experienced decreasing electoral margins since his first Governor’s race that he won handily and who only won by a few points last time is done after this term. At this point Sinema won’t survive a primary. So they’ve faced a choice. They can be like Heidi Heitkamp of ND who knew she was probably toast and cast some votes that didn’t go over well – knowing she was gone either way she decided to knock some bodies down with the weapon of doing the right thing. Machin and Sinema should do the same. From where I sit, they are either suffering from delusions of grandeur about their re-election chances and how history will see them, or they know they’ve blown it & are toast and extracting vengeance on their own Party instead of the GOP as they should be doing. Either way, if either one was on fire and there was no water handy I wouldn’t even piss on either to try and help them.
All that momentum lost. So they could strut around and preen in the spotlight. And it could very well be that by doing so they’ve given the coup de grace to our country, and the world. History will NOT be kind to them. It might take a hundred or even two hundred years for an autocratic world that their antics helped rise to power collapses and people rebuild as best they can from the ashes and look at the lessons of history to try and figure out both why they are in their situation and how to prevent it from happening again, but over time history has a way of exposing truth. Also, with us now in the information age uncovering a shitload of “WTF? Are you kidding me? They did THAT?” stuff will happen faster than in the past when most information was written down and not spread all throughout cyberspace.
I don’t know what Sinema thought she was doing. But as for Manchin, I didn’t ever get the sense that he was conflicted. Pretty well every decision he has made since Biden was elected, he did what he wanted to do. He is a small-minded, small-time politician thrust into a role of power he is not suited to. Everything he says is a platitude from at least 20 or 30 years ago. Everything he says is a rationalization for him to do exactly what he’s always done, and always for the benefir ot=f Numero Uno. The one self-justification of his that I will always remember, simply because it’s so empty, is , “I am not and have never been a liberal.” Fine, call yourself anything you like. But This is not about ideology. Don’t you realize the country, and the world is in a multiplex crisis, and it’s not just business as usual? What can you do to improve things? With power goes responsibility. And his only answer is, just what he’s been doing. The fact that Mitch McConnell is the president of the Joe Manchin fan club is not something for ANY Democrat to be proud of.
And you blame this on the Progressive Caucus? — which by the way, consists of 95 members. And which has all along been trying to pass BIDEN’s agenda, not their own.
Yeah I get you. I’m doing an article with a somewhat novel approach. I’m actually looking things up. Joe Biden has pulled off some shit. And you are right. It’s not getting any press because everyone is enamored with the progressives and the rhino democrats in the senate. Hell they could solve the whole dilemma by getting the bill passed with the provisions in the bill with no money and then add it later. After you get it past the clown squad. Jeezz what’s wrong with these people. Did they just get to congress or what. Used to be standard practice. But they haven’t done it for awhile so it would definitely work. Of course they haven’t done much of anything for several years.