By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Joe Biden won the 2020 election because he
understood that Twitter was not real life, and that Americans disagree
profoundly about matters of national import. Joe Biden has become disastrously
unpopular as quickly as he has because he has forgotten that Twitter is not
real life, and that Americans disagree profoundly about matters of national
import. If Biden’s tenure in the White House is to be saved from imminent
disaster, it will be because enough members of the Democratic Party — two, in
particular — remembered that Twitter is not real life and that Americans
disagree profoundly about matters of national import, and because they forced
the president squarely back into the real world.
After all the Sturm und Drang, Joe Manchin
and Kyrsten Sinema are looking pretty savvy.
Since the Senate convened in January, Senator Manchin’s
actions have tracked almost perfectly with the wishes of the West Virginians he
represents — which is one reason that those voters continue to like Manchin
fine, while strongly disliking President Biden and his team. As recent polling from the state shows, West Virginians
are overwhelmingly in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin
helped put together, but are vehemently opposed to the gargantuan “Build Back
Better” reconciliation bill toward which Manchin has been notably noncommittal.
Like Manchin, West Virginians are concerned about the prospect of inflation,
and they are not especially receptive to the administration’s preposterous
claim that yet another multi-trillion-dollar binge will be
just the thing to make it go away. Why is Manchin dragging his feet on the
president’s agenda? The question answers itself.
In purple Arizona, meanwhile, Kyrsten Sinema seems to be
the only elected Democrat who is aware of the challenges that lie ahead of her
and her party. It is often blithely asserted that Sinema’s approval numbers are
being dragged down in Arizona because she is an “obstructionist” bent on
torpedoing the Democratic agenda, and yet the skeptical Sinema is actually
slightly more popular (42 percent approval) than is her
rubber-stamp colleague, Mark Kelly (41 percent). The conventional wisdom holds
that moderates such as Sinema ought to vote with the party at all costs,
because they will be the first to go in an electoral wave. But there is a
counterpoint to this approach, and her name is Susan Collins of Maine. In 2017,
Collins helped kill the GOP’s Obamacare-repeal effort, and, three years later,
she won reelection, even as her party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump,
was beaten in the state by eleven points. Clearly, Collins grasped that she
could offer up a mixed bag of votes — yes on the tax cuts, no on Obamacare
repeal, yes on Brett Kavanaugh, no on Amy Coney Barrett — and remain acceptable
to enough voters to survive a tough year. Were I a betting man, I’d wager that
Sinema has studied that history and that she believes — reasonably enough, I’d
say — that Collins’s, not Kelly’s, is the better model to emulate.
Which is to say that, at this stage, a more interesting
question than, “Why are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema looking askew at their
party’s radicalism?” is: “Why isn’t everybody else?” We are still one year away
from the midterms, and already the Democrats’ political position is utterly
disastrous. As Forbes noted last week, the most recent Washington Post/ABC
News poll, “which is considered among the most reliable political
surveys, found 51% of registered voters leaning Republican on a generic
congressional ballot, with just 41% leaning toward Democrats” — a result that
“marks by far the biggest lead Republicans have ever held on a congressional
ballot in the poll’s history, which has surveyed the issue since 1981.” And
well it might be, given that 62 percent of Americans think the party is “out of
touch”; that the president’s approval rating is sitting at around 42 percent in
the country at large, and at about 33 percent in battleground states such as
Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin; and that, as ABC has observed, 59 percent of voters are
concerned that the president hopes to “do too much to increase the size and
role of government.”
When asked specific questions about spending — say,
“Would you like a pony?” — Americans are far more likely to say “yes” than
fiscal conservatives such as myself would like. When those same voters are
asked to factor in the costs and the context, however, their tunes are liable
to change. If they like, President Biden and his party can continue to insist
that their spending plan is popular, and that only intransigence or corruption
or stupidity could lead anyone to oppose it. But, if they do, they will miss
the forest for the trees, and they will be punished for it. As I write, American
debt is at a record level; our deficits are never-ending; our existing
safety-net programs are creaking at the seams; and, in a move that nobody could
have anticipated even two years ago, we have just spent six trillion dollars
fighting COVID-19. It is no doubt inconvenient that this is the backdrop
against which the Democrats have assumed unified control of Congress and the
White House for the first time a decade, but, as the philosopher once said,
that’s life. The electoral future of the Democratic Party hinges on whether it
accepts this as a fact, as Senators Manchin and Sinema seem willing to, or
tries stupidly to wish it away in the hope that this time things will be
different.
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