Democrats don't have a mandate for change.
They don't even have a majority.
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| 50-50 |
Joe Manchin said the simple truth. If you want to advance liberal causes, he told Democrats, "elect more liberals."
Democrats had a good chance to elect a liberal senator in North Carolina in 2020. It is a swing state. North Carolina voters elected Tom Tillis, a Republican.
In Maine Susan Collins won 51-42. Collins is a moderate. She sometimes votes with Democrats when her vote is irrelevant, but she is a reliable Republican when McConnell needs her to be one.
In Iowa incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst had the burden of Iowa soybean farmers having their crop rejected by the Chinese, in retaliation to Trump tariffs. She won anyway, with 52% of the vote.
Democrats had opportunities. Trump was uniquely controversial at a time when COVID cases and deaths were at their highest. Voters rejected Trump himself, but kept Republican senators who backed Trump.
Joe Manchin is a Democrat in a state that loves Trump. West Virginia is rural, White, blue collar, and church-going. Its population is the archetypal Trump voting base. Democratic messaging is clear and consistent that fossil fuels are bad and that coal is the worst of the worst. West Virginia's biggest industry is coal. Green New Deal messaging declared war on coal, and therefore on West Virginians and their way of life, in a state John Denver called "almost heaven."
Democrats need to stop and look around. If a deal is going to get done, it won't have a big Green New Deal component because it needs at least 50 votes. The problem isn't Manchin. He is being who he always was, a Democrat who got elected in West Virginia.
Kristin Sinema represents Arizona. Her issues seem to be taxes and drug pricing. There are a lot of conservative retirees in Arizona, and they are notoriously anti-tax. Her tax position is not surprising. She is also sympathetic to drug companies. Democrats can stop the faux dismay that she gets campaign help from those companies. Every U.S. senator gets financial support from some industry, or two, or three, plus for Democrats, some union, or two, or three. Democrats are unhappy that she is standing in the way of using Medicare's market power to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs.
Democrats have a mixed message. Democrats say that drug companies were a lifesaver when it came to COVID. They employ cutting edge research, and they are trustworthy, very trustworthy, and care about us. Get vaccinated. Meanwhile, drug companies are money-grabbing extortionists who put their own interests first.
The reality is that the American taxpayer overpays the drug companies. In exchange, we fatten up their R&D budgets--and stockholders--and we get more and faster new drugs than we otherwise would. Americans are getting their third COVID vaccine doses, while much of the rest of the world has none. We are paying for that. Kristin Sinema is on the side of continuing that extraordinary subsidy,
Whatever bill gets through will not have a significant change in either coal or drug pricing. Democrats look confused and lost, but they are not lost. They just don't like where they are: One vote short.
Democrats need to face the real problem. Democrats lose by attempting to please their most liberal, woke, point-of-the-spear supporters on cultural issues, and they project a kind of moral superiority over culturally conservative people. It is why Black and Hispanic voters are drifting away, and would do so faster if GOP messaging were not so hostile to them. How do I know that? It is because that is what Trump, Fox, GOP officeholders and GOP candidates all hammer on. They don't defend high drug prices or tax cuts for billionaires. They talk about transgender bathrooms and the left's accusation that all Whites are racially prejudiced, whether they know it or not.
Democrats can console themselves by knowing they are morally right and working to move to a more just America. An emotionally satisfying way to display a superior moral position is to condemn and sneer at the people who "don't get it." Not everyone does that, but there is enough of that coming out of liberal cities and academic environments that this message becomes the caricature of Democratic thinking. Prudent Democrats who want to have majority power in the chambers of Congress could inoculate themselves if they called it out, clearly and forcefully condemning that attitude, but so far I don't see it happening. They don't want to lose their progressive woke base. Social change is happening, but it is happening faster than a majority of people are comfortable with and people don't like to feel scolded. That is how culturally conservative people feel, and they feel it so strongly they will support GOP senators and a narcissistic, autocratic, election-overthrowing, race-baiter for president, rather than trust people who they think sneer at them.
15 comments:
Exactly right. Smug contempt is not a winning message. Too many Democrats seem to think the entire country is Portland.
There’s an old joke about having to hit a donkey in the head with a 2 x 4 just to get its attention. 2022 is coming right up, and the lumberyard has another one with 2024 written all over it.
The COVID vaccine is subsidized. Note that Regressives made the vaccine free, and nobody complained about government overreach.
If the COVID vaccine was not free it would cost around $35 per dose, and it's reported that the government pays $15. If all 300 of us million get vaccinated this is 4.5 Billion dollars paid to the drug companies, at least. Pfizer has reported about a billion in profits in the first quarter of 2021. What would it cost if we had to pay through insurance?
Wait!... actually it's not free, is it? It's taxpayer money.
As far as "woke" is concerned, this is the same social commentary that has been at the forefront of the Progressive movement since the turn of the Century, and I mean the 19th century. Moral superiority is actually a value, and those who are morally deficient have always been defensive when it's brought to their attention.
100% with Mr Trigoboff.
“An emotionally satisfying way to display a superior moral position is to condemn and sneer at the people who ‘don't get it.’”
Seen every day, including today, in these comments.
You tune out everything they say? I tune out everything you say.
“…. we get more and faster new drugs than we otherwise would.”
The vaccines are as good as we can get right now, but most drugs are nowhere close that good, and prices are shooting up. Have you checked the Medicare Part D drug plans this year?
Congress has been an abject failure on this for years. Let’s see what it actually manages to get done. I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high.
It's worth noting that the percent of voters who disapprove of Congress is similar to the percent of senators and representatives who get re-elected. This is typical of the cognitive dissonance prevalent in our country, as evidenced by the mentally ill, race-baiting, seditious demagogue who remains the undisputed leader of the GOP, in spite of all the Republicans that supposedly disavow him.
A recent poll from the University of New Hampshire found that 45 percent of likely Democrat voters in their first-in-the-nation 2024 primary would like to see President Joe Biden be challenged, showing the first signs of dissatisfaction within the state.
The granite state poll found that only 29 percent would prefer to see Biden run unopposed in the primary, with an additional 26 percent who said they either “don’t know” or are “not sure.”
Interesting observation Michael S. I don't think your numbers are quite correct but still worth noting:
According to Gallup's survey, confidence in Congress is at an all-time low. What's most interesting is that public confidence in the American People is also correspondingly low, with GOP respondents as having the least confidence in American people.
Yet this Ballotpedia data show that incumbent reelection rates average 93% with no election less than 90%.
There's a lot that you can infer from this, but being speculative here, might it be a signal that many, especially GOP, have lost faith in the concept of self-governance? Maybe that's the reason 40% of GOP think violence is justifiable to maintain power?
It could be the old Devil You Know syndrome, which may also explain how the Democrats ultimately arrived at mush-mouthed addlepate Joe Biden from that large, diverse group of contenders.
It's similarly odd that in a given hour on CNN and MSNBC (and post or comment thread here!) Trump's name gets dropped about three times as often as the sitting president's, ten months in.
Is it the Fascination of the Abomination? Or maybe it's better characterized as anything BUT that far more salient and immediate train-wreck. Joe rode the train for 36 years as Veep...
Nice try, Low, but Joe wasn't Veep for 36 years. The most likely reason for the continued fascination with Trump is that he's the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and as such, but he and the party continue to make such a spectacle of themselves.
Mike—
Joe himself just claimed on video in public to have been Veep for 36 years, in one of his inevitable gaffes when it’s anything other than shuffling off the stage after six minutes squinting at the teleprompter.
Thanks for helping to prove my point about the odd Democratic preoccupation with Trump the “spectacle”, as opposed to attention to any affirmative good the actual sitting President might or should accomplish.
Not much of that there. Despite Mr. Sage’s contention about “Green” Democrats and fossil fuels, Biden gave Putin a waiver to run a natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, not long after closing our own Keystone.
Now instead of using that cleaner fuel self-sufficiently ourselves, the U.S. suddenly wheedles for supply to Putin and even OPEC, while China continues to open a new coal-fired power plant every week or two.
Heckuva job, Joey! Or rather, Susan….
I guess I just don't watch enough Fox "News." For example, I didn't realize Putin needed a waiver from Biden to run a natural gas pipeline to Europe.
Anyway, we have a minimum age for president. I think there should also be a maximum.
A variety of news sources is preferable in my opinion to one’s party echo chamber or choir loft. There’s no wonder you’re unaware of Biden’s recent and seemingly inexplicable pipeline concession, making Putin vastly more wealthy and worse (gasp!) harming the environment. You can look it up via Google News, which will give you a variety of sources.
There’s little more silly today than arch, reflexive objections from Democrats about Fox News, as if a report from there puts 2 + 2 = 4 in doubt thereby. A few years ago now CNN and MSNBC (as well as the NYT and WaPo) decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and it’s been primarily to exclusively partisan advocacy journalism from them ever since.
I'm aware of all the hoopla over sanctions. Nonetheless, I think it's pretty obvious that Putin doesn't need a waiver from Biden to build the pipeline because it's already about 95% complete.
As important as is what you consider “pretty obvious”, Mike, NBC News via Dan De Luce, 5/19/21 reported bipartisan concern under the headline “Biden under fire from Congress for waiving sanctions on Russian gas pipeline company”. You can look it up. Wherever the pipeline was in construction, Biden’s cave made it profitable, as opposed to a non-starter, and handed Putin a non-Green “geopolitical victory”. Now we beg him for gas supply. Net environmental push.
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