“What will the Republicans say?” state- and county-level Democrats said, recoiling. They flinched almost like abused dogs here a decade after the electoral wipeout of 1994. Bold, forward-looking proposals? No way. Republicans would use them as cudgels against Democratic candidates. Like the Green New Deal today.
Have Democrats learned that it matters not what they do? If Republicans don’t have a ready campaign issue, they’ll just make something up.
Democrats winning both U.S. Senate seats up for grabs in Georgia on Jan. 5 is a long shot. Even if they gain control of the Senate that control will likely be fleeting. Two years at best. Like control of the U.S. House which could go away in the 2022 mid-term elections.
Joe Biden’s administration will have limited time to work whatever it can manage to shore up this beleaguered republic with or without Senate control.
David Roberts of Vox agrees, “Biden could face total congressional opposition, even impeachment — as the recent baseless ‘stolen election’ narrative has shown, if Republicans don’t have any evidence, they’ll just make something up.”
Roberts believes Biden going slow is a recipe for failure in the face of the relentless propaganda campaign it can expect even before Day 1.
The Obama administration in which Biden served as vice president believed in 2009 its political capitol and maneuvering room was limited. The country was in a deep recession and Obama’s team felt it could take on only one fight at a time, hoping to find a few Republican votes to pass its stimulus package and health care reform. Republicans met Obama with bad-faith arguments and and a wall of opposition that dragged out passage of the Affordable Care Act until March 2010. That was Obama’s high-water mark.
Knowing what to expect, going that route again is a fool’s game. Biden should not play by Republican rules. He should not attempt to tackle pressing issues one at a time, Roberts writes. Biden should run a blitz: Do everything at once:
By constantly blundering forward, Trump has helped chart which US institutions and norms provide real resistance and which don’t. The courts have tangibly restrained Trump; they have been the primary bulwark against him. But the chattering of the media and the political classes? Moral outrage? Precedent and tradition? Civil protest?
All of these have proven gossamer. Trump charged right through them like they were cotton candy. By constantly acting, being on the offensive, generating new stories and controversies, he simply overwhelmed the ability of the system to fasten on any one thing.
Biden should learn the lesson. All that matters is what gets done, put on paper and into law. The rest is vapor.
The administration should staff up as rapidly as possible with ambitious young progressives and tell every single civil servant that the next two years are going to be a full sprint. Start immediately rewriting and reimplementing the environmental, public health, and worker safety regulations Trump has weakened. Reverse his immigration policies. Drop his lawsuits.
Reassess the social cost of carbon. Replace Trump’s weak Affordable Clean Energy rule with more stringent carbon rules for the power sector. Ditch EPA’s “secret science” rule and restock scientific advisory boards with actual scientists. Put a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling leases on public land. Pledge the purchasing power of the federal government — around $500 billion a year — toward clean energy technology.
Etc. Let Republicans call Democrats socialists or communists. They will anyway. Let Biden’s response be actions, not talk. By January 2023, Republicans could try impeaching him anyway. For what does not matter. They will make something up.
Flood the zone with actions the way Republicans “flood the zone with shit.” There will be failures as well as actions that will fall short of campaign promises. Progressives will be frustrated, Roberts writes. But with limited clout and a two-year time frame for action, actions are what’s needed. Yardage gained. Points on the board.
Biden’s best chance is to try to overwhelm the system the way Trump did, by doing so much that it’s impossible to make any one thing into a lasting story. He should launch so many simultaneous reforms that there’s no time for right-wing media to make up lies about all of them or for the Supreme Court to hear them all. He should ignore bad-faith attacks and stay relentlessly on message about what’s gotten done and what’s getting done next. He should, at every juncture, get caught trying to make government work better for ordinary people.
Democrats’ haphazard national messaging must improve, too, if they are to support measurably improving people’s lives in the short term so they can do more down the road. (I know a few people, and so does Roberts.)
Failing that, as surely they will, Democrats should, Roberts recommends, “get persistent party infrastructure on the ground in communities the party has neglected.” But the party already has persistent infrastructure on the ground (well, in about 80% of them anyway). The problem is it is decrepit, under-resourced and under-trained — ineffective both at turning out votes and at changing minds. What needs to be persistent is party presence in communities between elections. Howard Dean tried to build that. I continue to. Numerous groups have floated innovative ideas for voter engagement, but for actualizing them outside major cities they lack even the persistent infrastructure of sleepy, local party committees.
The kind of “woke” Democrats need out there is not so much ideological as institutional. But as Vote Forward, Mobilize America and others know, to have persistent efforts requires a vital organization as a nexus for mobilizing. Unions once filled that role. Party committees in some places still do, just not in the rural places Roberts means.
Why not? Because there is no money behind it and no career advancement in it for aggressive young organizers. The billions raised every general election flow into individual campaign coffers for winning specific races for specific candidates, not into state and local committees for creating persistent, effective infrastructure in between elections. They languish. I wish I had a solution for that. Those who think they do form yet another nonprofit and begin fundraising online for themselves the way candidates do, and progressive efforts diffuse rather than focus.
For now,
The best thing Biden can do, morally and politically, is act, as much and as fast as possible, and then talk about it, and do more of it, and talk about it more. (And he should be clear about exactly who stands in the way of bigger, better changes, and why his name is Mitch McConnell.)
The rest of it, he should ignore: the Washington chatter about the latest Republican accusations or catty infighting among Democratic factions, the cable news story or Twitter drama of the day, the latest offensive thing Trump or some Trump surrogate said, all of it. Bulldoze through it.
Actions speak louder.