Biden Is a Captive of Progressives

By John Fund

Sunday, October 30, 2022

 

President Biden will soon be reading a political autopsy written by people in his own party. That’s how bad the midterm elections look for the Democrats.

 

In 2021, in a long screed entitled “The Democrats Are Trying to Lose: How party leaders learned to stop worrying and love losing to GOP fascists,” David Sirota, a former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders, accused Biden of running a Vichy Democrat administration.

 

And in January this year, liberal Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wondered why Biden had abandoned crafting centrist bills that could pass a narrowly divided Congress. Instead, Ignatius lamented, Biden “chases support from progressives in his own party.”

 

Biden has only tacked farther left since these criticisms, and it’s obvious why. It’s not Biden’s “reformist” Democratic Party anymore. “Transformational” progressives set out to take the party over 15 years ago, and they’ve succeeded. But their excesses have convinced remaining centrists, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, that they are taking the party and much of the country over the cliff and that their zeal has few limits.

 

The takeover began in December 2004, in the wake of John Kerry’s unexpected loss in the presidential race against George W. Bush. Leaders of MoveOn.org emailed their donors to announce the silver lining: Its huge fundraising hauls had “proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our party: We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”

 

Scott Walter, who monitors money flows in politics at the Capital Research Center, says that email was a watershed: “Since 2005, the nonprofit tail has wagged the Democratic Party dog.” Campaign-finance “reform” has shifted money and power in politics away from candidates and parties and toward foundations, front groups, and billionaire donors.

 

In his 2012 book, Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, left-wing reporter Sasha Issenberg noted that the new players “became a backdoor approach to ginning up Democratic votes outside the campaign finance laws, parties, and political action committees.”

 

In February 2021, Molly Ball, the progressive biographer of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote an article for Time magazine headlined “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The decisive element in Biden’s 2020 victory, she said, came from “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information.”

 

The size of the Left’s alternative power structure is obscured by loopholes that allow its “dark money” flows to remain largely hidden. But the tip of the iceberg is revealing enough. Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm that the Center for Public Integrity calls a “dark money heavyweight,” raised $2.4 billion in the 2020 election cycle.

 

That compares with the $493 million raised by the Democratic National Committee and the $891 million raised by the Republican National Committee. With that kind of financial clout comes influence and the power to dictate party policy. It’s no secret that after Biden’s victory, Democratic civil-rights groups were asked what they wanted to include in a mega-bill that would have the federal government effectively take over election decisions from the states. The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act was a 735-page behemoth that is not only purely partisan but also an administrative nightmare. The same pattern explains the sprawling, ramshackle spending monster that was the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

 

President Biden’s problem is that he didn’t campaign on the transformational change represented by those bills. Instead, on the very limited occasions when he surfaced at all during the presidential campaign, he promised stability and normalcy after the tumultuous Trump era.

 

Biden thought he could bridge the gap in his party between the far Left and the center Left. Henry Olsen, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post, noted last week that Biden, in his 50-year career, has prided himself on being “a political Zelig, able to materialize in whatever image Democrats want to project.” He tasked his staff, led by Chief of Staff Ron Klain, a faithful retainer for Biden for 30 years, with mollifying the progressives hungry for change; meanwhile, he would broker compromises in inside-baseball negotiations.

 

But this approach alienated two groups that had given him only tenuous support in 2020: progressives and independents. The former have never trusted Biden and only reluctantly agreed to support his nomination in the political turmoil surrounding the government’s shambolic response to Covid. The Left has kept Biden on a short leash. 

 

Independent voters have rebelled against what they increasingly view as a loony Left steering the Biden White House. Biden’s approval rating among independents is now down around 25 percent in some polls. The White House dismisses such polls as “outliers,” but Biden rarely tops 30 percent support among voters in the center of the spectrum.

 

Biden’s way out of his political hole isn’t clear. When the Washington Post interviewed 28 Democratic strategists and officials earlier this year, it found profound skepticism among them on the question of whether Biden will run again in 2024. In the eyes of many people, and across the political spectrum, he has clearly become a diminished figure, and that assessment is now being discussed publicly. Earlier this year, retiring GOP senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska — a Never Trumper who styles himself as a moderate — dismissed Biden’s hyperbolic partisan speeches as the “senile comments of a man who read whatever was loaded into his teleprompter.”

 

Joe Biden in his prime was capable of “Sister Souljah” moments like the ones Bill Clinton used in the 1990s to spurn extremists in his party and bond with centrist voters. As a senator, Biden sponsored a tough anti-crime bill in the 1990s; he has since repudiated that bill. He also noted the “limited, finite ability the government has to deal with people’s problems.” He authored a bill to sunset federal programs unless they were specifically reauthorized.

 

But the Joe Biden of today is captive to the progressive wing of his party. It is outside his control; it holds the financial clout that all Democrats have become dependent on, and it won’t take half a loaf as a legislative solution. As a result, in next week’s midterm elections, Biden is likely to lead his party into a historic defeat in which they lose almost the whole loaf of power.