There are a lot of reasons why the Democrats and President Joe Biden have plummeted in the polls and then absorbed a huge defeat across the country in the recent election.
As often is the case in politics, the party in charge gets the blame even if they arise from circumstances beyond its control.
Almost all of the issues that have been troubling Americans in the past few months are no fault of Biden and the Democrats. The ongoing pandemic, supply-chain snafus, labor shortages, inflation worries, weather-related crises, and soaring energy prices all either were inherited by Biden or are the result of unforeseen circumstances.
The Biden administration could have done better with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but that too, was a circumstance he inherited and that spiraled out of control.
However, there is one aspect of the Biden Presidency and the Democratic control of Congress that is within their control. And that is their ability to get things done.
On August 10, a bipartisan vote of the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill. However, the bill sat for months in the House because of the efforts of a willful group of Democratic House members who held it hostage to their demands for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation.
We would note that we fully have supported every aspect of the Build Back Better Plan, including the Green New Deal which we endorsed from the outset when it first was introduced by Senator Ed Markey and Rep. Alexaandra Ocasio Cortez in January of 2019.
In fact, we would support an even-larger bill in order to bring America into the 21st century.
However, the reality is that there are Democratic members of Congress who do not agree with all of the proposals in the Build Back Better Plan and who have been saying so for months.
Yet the so-called Progressives in the House refused to accept this reality. Democrats promised the voters that if they were put in charge, they’d get things done — but the intransigence of the so-called Progressives served not only to undermine the Biden administration and Democrats in general, but also sank their own cause as well.
For all of their posturing and demand-making, they have nothing — nada — zero — to show for their efforts.
As we have said many times in this column, politics is the art of compromise. Or, as Kenny Rogers put it,
“You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em.”
The Progressives’ hubris served as a gift to the Republicans.
Instead of Progressing the country forward, their political gamesmanship has undermined Americans’ faith in the democratic process and Regressed us back to the era before 2020.