Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Democrats Lost Because They Were Too Nice

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, November 06, 2022

 

As we approach an Election Day that appears likely to be a GOP landslide, you’re starting to hear a few voices on the left warn that this is a signal that the Democrats are overdue for a major course correction.

 

The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent tells his readers something they probably don’t want to hear, that the Democratic argument that electing Republicans jeopardizes democracy itself just doesn’t resonate with swing voters. Former Associated Press Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier puts it even more bluntly: “A party that loses to Trump’s GOP must be fundamentally and culturally flawed.”

 

I’m pleasantly surprised that, at least so far, we haven’t heard many progressives offering the tired, implausible excuse that Democrats will lose because they were too nice or too conciliatory towards the opposition. But I suspect that after Tuesday, at least some progressives, who were never big fans of Joe Biden’s paeans to old-school back-slapping bipartisanship to begin with, choose to interpret the election as evidence that Biden’s instinctive desire to work in a bipartisan manner failed. Biden reached out to the other side and look what happened!

 

The first problem with this interpretation is that Biden turned his bipartisanship on and off like a light switch. Biden did get a decent number of Republican legislators to buy in on certain pieces of legislation like the infrastructure bill, the gun-safety bill, and the burn-pits bill. But some major pieces of legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, were passed along party lines, and Biden made some sweeping changes through executive order, such as his $10,000 per person student-loan bailout. Also, Biden was perfectly happy to demonize the opposition when he felt the political need to do so, whether it was comparing opponents to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis in a speech in Georgia in January, or warning that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” in his Independence Hall speech. (In the same speech, Biden spoke of the need to “respect our legitimate political differences.”)

 

If Democrats get crushed in the midterms, it won’t be because Biden was just too darn nice and conciliatory. The biggest reason will be the runaway inflation rate, which was exacerbated by throwing another $1.9 trillion into a recovering economy in spring 2021, creating too much money that chased too few goods. In other words, Democrats are in this mess because they got what they wanted . . . on an almost entirely party-line vote. (Democratic congressman Jared Golden of Maine can take a bow for warning, “When combined with the over $4 trillion we have already spent battling the coronavirus, borrowing and spending hundreds of billions more in excess of meeting the most urgent needs poses a risk to both our economic recovery and the priorities I would like to work with the Biden Administration to achieve.”)

 

The second problem is where this interpretation would lead us. Imagine Biden (or Kamala Harris, or some other future Democratic president) renouncing bipartisanship as a naïve dream of a bygone era, pledging to ignore the opposition party, and ramming through the Democratic Party’s agenda by any means necessary: Nuking the filibuster, expanding the Supreme Court, and making as many sweeping changes by executive order as possible. Just how do you think Republicans would react? Just how thrilled would Democratic lawmakers in purple states and districts be? (Admittedly, after these midterms, Democratic lawmakers in purple states and districts may be rarer.) The backlash would almost certainly involve a future Republican president’s taking the same approach to governing.

 

Democrats and Republicans are stuck with each other, which means we must figure out how to live together. We have dramatically different policy priorities and agendas, but there are occasional areas of agreement. Both parties are growing more wary of China, both parties worry about the pervasiveness of fentanyl, and Democrats are running as fast as they can from the George Floyd “defund the police” rhetoric. (China, drug smugglers, and criminals: Nothing unites people like an external threat.)

 

It is likely that every future president is going to replicate some version of Biden’s straddle — expressing a desire for bipartisan unity but enacting big changes through party-line votes when that’s the only way to achieve a long-desired policy goal.