The short answer is that President Joe Biden lacks leadership and lacks the ability to actually sell anyone on any piece of his domestic agenda.
Democrats were living in the spend-happy world of Covid-19 seemed as if it would allow another $6 trillion in spending to sail on through, no questions asked.
Then people started asking questions about whether that would be the wise thing to do. It’s not, of course, wise to spend trillions more on top of the trillions spent driving up the national debt and contributing to inflation.
There are plenty of answers depending on who you ask. The question of why Biden failed so badly at passing his signature legislation while Democrats control the House and Senate is a humorous path to travel filled with finger-pointing in every direction:
In conversations with more than a dozen people involved with the legislation, conflicting theories emerged about who is responsible for President Joe Biden’s lost legislative agenda.
The White House blames it on the difficulties of uniting the slimmest of Democratic majorities, including a 50-50 Senate, and media framing of the initial legislation. Moderate Democrats blame progressives for fueling unrealistic expectations. Progressives blame moderates for working against Biden. Some blame Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer or Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Other Democrats say leaders made a tactical error by splitting off the infrastructure bill.
And still others fault Biden and his team, saying they erred in branding Build Back Better as a big, bold, once-in-a-generation — read: expensive — piece of legislation and by trying to, as one Democrat put it, “placate everybody.”
Another Democrat placed fault with the current polarized political climate, saying: “It’s the process.”
John LaBombard, the former communications director for centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., said part of the problem was a mismatch between “sky high” expectations and narrow margins. Democrats’ thin majorities in the House and Senate necessitated the votes of moderates who “did not campaign on big, bold, radical, progressive change,” he said, citing Sinema, Manchin and Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida.
The last paragraph above may be the most pertinent. Biden did not campaign on a platform of wrapping up progressive pet projects like universal preschool into a $6 trillion piece of legislation and make that a cornerstone of his campaign.
Biden, as we reported, campaigned on empathy, and little more. The goal was to simply appear as if he was the “steady hand” to lead Washington. As soon as he was inaugurated, that all changed, and he shifted very far left adopting left-wing causes as his primary agenda and trying to package it into something called Build Back Better.
There was also plenty of miscommunication between the White House and Democratic leadership in the House and Senate as to just how this steaming pile of garbage should be sold to the American people:
Some Democrats, including in the administration, conceded early on that the initial $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act was less a realistic legislative endgame and more a blueprint of the president’s priorities — a mixture of his campaign pledges and measures aimed at drawing a contrast with Republicans. It was a starting point for negotiations, they say.
But that’s not how it was sold to the public.
No, that’s in fact not how it was sold to the public. It was constantly sold as a finished piece of trillion-dollar legislation that would fix every problem known to mankind, not as a negotiation starting point. Also, it was constantly said it would pay for itself in a few years and everyone got a free unicorn in the process. It was all lies, based on bad projections and withholding of details that would drive up costs exponentially for decades to come.
Then there’s this little gem hidden down in the NBC story linked above. Did Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intentionally derail Biden’s agenda by withholding what he knew about Sen. Joe Manchin’s firm position?
Apart from Manchin, the one individual that seems to get the most blame is Schumer.
A senior House Democratic aide pointed to Schumer’s decision last summer — amid negotiations on a $3.5 trillion bill — to spend months not sharing with the White House or Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter from Manchin, dated July 28, in which he said he would not support a bill that cost more than $1.5 trillion.
“He knew where Manchin was and he didn’t say a damn thing,” the aide, clearly still frustrated, said of Schumer.
Schumer knew Manchin would never sign on to anything that cost more than $1.5 trillion, but he never told the White House. Why then did Schumer allow the price tag to balloon much higher, and let the Biden administration believe it was negotiating something between $3 and $6 trillion?
These are not smart people running Washington, they can’t even negotiate among themselves properly when they’re all on the same team. The question then becomes whether they are all truly part of the same time. Someone like Schumer will be in Washington longer than Biden will, and he only cares about maintaining power. Did he tank Biden’s agenda on purpose to prevent a bigger wipeout in the Senate?
At this point, it seems unlikely that Democrats will pass much of anything for Biden before the midterms. The clock is running down, House members will all be in campaign mode soon, and the appetite will be gone.
Biden’s a colossally bad leader and the disastrous non-result of his Build Back Better legislative push is a prime example of it.
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