Stay on message
“How they do it,” Digby’s post and comments on “Tough Love For the Democrats” from Rick Wilson’s substack, blew up my Mastodon feed last night. Quite a fewf people agree it’s time for Democrats to stop farting around and treat the fight with MAGA as what it is: a fight.
Wilson shares the GOP’s two rules:
Rule 1: Just win, baby.
Rule 2: Stay on message.
Chuck your “almost religious belief that policy wins elections,” Wilson advises. Quit trying to win on fact-checking. This is a bare-knuckles brawl. Wilson credits Joe Biden for declaring MAGA Republicans a threat in 2022, that what was at stake is democracy and liberty. It still is. Next year’s elections are about “whether the American government is a tool for opportunity or one of oppression.”
“Get on and stay on this message, Democrats,” Wilson insists. Biden has gotten results. The former Republican consultant names Biden “arguably the most successful Democratic President since FDR, taken in total.”
A friend with Clinton White House experience concurs. Clinton came into office with an ambitious agenda and large margins in the House and Senate. In his first two years, Clinton “got one big budget bill through, and a NAFTA bill the Republicans and Big Business liked a lot more than working people and Democrats.” (That’s for sure.) But then things went to hell.
Obama had a decent first two years as well, Mike Lux continues:
When a youthful Barack Obama swept into power with huge margins in both houses of Congress, he had an ambitious agenda as well. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act passed (which was indeed “a big effing deal”) and the Dodd-Frank bill tightened up some Wall Street regulations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, but everything else on his agenda fell by the wayside as Republicans crushed Democrats in the 2010 election, controlling Congress for the rest of Obama’s presidency.
Joe Biden entered the White House with big ambitions, too. The moment he entered was even more perilous than the financial crisis Obama faced. Like Obama and Clinton, he had a trifecta, but his Congress was the most closely divided in modern history — a 50/50 Senate with Vice-President Harris breaking the tie, and a four seat margin in the House.
But because of his age and experience, Joe Biden had far more success in getting things done than any president in modern history. After two years in office, President Biden’s legislative and executive action track record engendered a debate among historians: was it the most sweeping and transformative administration in 60 years or in 90?
Let’s check the box scores:
Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away. They made the biggest investment any country has ever made in clean energy.
The four trillion dollars in investments in the American economy and American people will transform the economy for generations to come.
Pundits who take the “Biden’s too old” bait deserve ridicule, Wilson believes. “Trump is just as old, much less fit, and a proven threat to the nation’s future. Start playing offense on this message, Democrats.”
And Lux? “In terms of the great things he got done, [Biden] kicked the ass of every other president in modern times.”
Saving democracy from autocratic movements has in other times and in other countries required strange-bedfellow coalitions, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in “Tyranny of the Minority.” Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger sacrificed their political careers to join with Democrats on the January 6th Committee. Should our republic survive its current crisis, no doubt our political disagreements with anti-Trump Republicans like them and members of The Lincoln Project will resurface. Until then, welcome to the party, pals.