Ron Brownstein reviews where President Biden’s signature (and still unpassed) spending bill stands. He emphasizes that Democrats should not approach Build Back Better with the same Eeyore-ish sighs about what’s not in it that they did in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act:
“If we let our laments about what isn’t in there dominate our communication of what is in there, we will be repeating the same mistake,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic communications strategist, told me. “When you look at the overall polling on ACA, one of the reasons it struggled in the early years is it didn’t have Democrats with it.”
In its reduced form, the reconciliation bill no longer justifies the frequent comparisons to the New Deal and Great Society that were common at the larger price tag (and which Biden reportedly repeated at his meeting with House Democrats yesterday). But even after all of the accommodations to Manchin and Sinema, the final bill will still represent the biggest concentration of new and expanded federal initiatives since President Lyndon B. Johnson passed those Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Counting down from $3.5 trillion leaves Democrats telling a story of loss, but counting up to $1.75 trillion allows Democrats to highlight a substantial list of long-standing party priorities that will move into law.
Declare victory and take victory laps from now to November 2022 (after something gets to Biden’s desk). Ignore the naysayers and Republicans. There will be elements in the package that advance the goal of addressing climate change and more. Everything on your wish list? No. Welcome to the average American child’s Christmas morning.
“Basically, they took out all the sticks and left the carrots,” climate activist Bill McKibben told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Friday night. “But there’s so much money there that it will jump start, in important ways, the move towards renewable energy. It’s not a home run, but it’s probably enough to keep the game alive.”
And for average Americans? Brownstein adds:
Biden “is trying to crystallize some policy consequences from the growing concern with working-age families and children, which along with universal health care has been the big missing piece in the American system of public social provision,” says the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, who has studied the history of the U.S. social safety net. “The COVID pandemic helped to underline some of those issues about balancing care of family with paid work, particularly for women. And it has become increasingly clear that you are punished if you try to have and raise children in this society. I think what he’s most insistent about, and has been all along … is that he wants to start addressing those issues.”
The framework agreement includes a suite of programs to advance that goal:
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- a universal pre-K program for all 3- and 4-year-olds;
- a new system of child-care subsidies that will cap most families’ spending on child care at 7 percent of their income;
- a one-year extension of the increased child tax credit that sends $300 a month per child to parents of children under 6 and $250 a month for each child ages 6 to 17 in families earning up to $150,000 annually;
- a big increase in funding for Medicaid services to allow seniors and disabled individuals to receive care at home, which is intended to relieve the financial squeeze on families in the “sandwich generation” caring for both young children and aging parents
- a one-year expansion of the earned-income tax credit to cover more childless working-age adults.
The most important effort once Democrats pass the bills is to remind Americans that the Biden programs will “help stabilize their finances and lower their costs.” Losing the drug cost reductions to Sens. Manchin’s and Sinema’s, um, proclivities, won’t help the effort. Still, “Democrats can still point to new programs that will limit families’ expenses for health insurance and child care and put more money in their pockets via the expanded child tax credit.”
Next year may be too soon for voters to feel those effects, but Democrats need them to identify those benefits with Democrats when they do.
The admonition in the title is premature. Nothing has been settled. But if Democrats want credit for what they accomplish, they have to, as evangelicals say, name it and claim it. Or else the approbrium Republicans heap on them will win the day. And perhaps both houses of Congress in 2022.
“If we are running on policy appeals and they are running on identity appeals, we are going to lose that battle,” Obama White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “But identity isn’t just race and gender; it’s who you are fighting for and who you are fighting against.”
People won’t know if Democrats don’t tell them because they are too busy grousing about what they didn’t get. “There’s a dark cloud in every silver lining” is a losing message that won’t activate voters. Nor will it hasten the revolution. Not the kind we want, anyway.
A-B-C. Always be closing.
Declare victory and don’t stop. The opposition does.
Even when they lose.