[With apologies to Samuel Beckett, of course...] We all now seem to be waiting for the C.B.O. Or perhaps this is just another chapter in our long and drawn out struggle with Senator Manchin of West Virginia... in other words: more waiting for Joe. Whatever you want to call it, so far it definitely belongs in the category of "tragicomedy."

Not-so-amusing literary wordplay aside, however, we seem to be in an interim period here. Let's try a sports metaphor instead: It's halftime in Joe Biden's legislative football game. Right at the end of the first half, the Democrats put a big score on the board by passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill and sending it to Biden's desk for his signature.

Continue Reading »

President Joe Biden is in the midst of a blitz of salesmanship. He's got every right to do so, after Congress finally moved the bipartisan infrastructure bill to his desk after months of delays. And Biden has long been aware that one of the biggest mistakes Barack Obama ever made as president was failing to properly whip up public support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which would have been easy to do since Republicans were already (derisively) calling it "Obamacare." Biden saw the dynamics of this failure play out, as Obama's veep. So he has long said he's not going to repeat the same mistake during his presidency. Which is why seeing him out in the country selling the various parts of his infrastructure plan was entirely predictable.

Still, it is nice to see it happen. Biden's not just "spiking the football" -- that will happen when Congress returns to Washington next week, when the expectation is that Biden will have at least a few Republicans standing behind him while he ceremoniously signs the bill. What Biden is doing now is more education of the public -- which is an absolute necessity.

Continue Reading »

We are currently in the midst of yet another Democratic failure to properly frame a political issue. This time President Joe Biden and his administration are largely to blame, although other Democrats should really be pushing back on the media's lazy acceptance of a false Republican narrative as well. When the Biden administration announced a new OSHA rule for all private businesses with 100 or more employees, it should have -- from the very start -- pointedly called it a "testing mandate." Because that is what it is, plain and simple. It is a requirement that all employees get tested once a week for the COVID-19 virus. And that's all it is -- that is the only thing it actually mandates.

Republicans, of course, went ballistic. It's what they're best at, these days. But in doing so, they have (so far) successfully painted the testing mandate as something it is not -- a vaccination mandate. They do this by either conspicuously failing to mention the testing at all, or just flat-out lying about it:

Continue Reading »

Republicans have never been particularly scrupulous about the fantastical political narratives they adapt in order to bamboozle the voters -- and that was even before the champion and master of lies came along and hijacked their party. Donald Trump may have driven the GOP to Crazytown, but it wasn't that far of a journey for them to take (to put this another way). Now conservatives in the media are attempting to do this again, and it really deserves some pushback.

Here is the emerging narrative, which has been fed by Republican resistance to both of President Joe Biden's big economic bills, and which got even more acute after the election returns came in last week: "Joe Biden ran as a moderate. He ran on bringing the country together and meeting in the middle. He didn't run to dramatically change the federal government or be F.D.R. or anything -- that's not what his voters were voting for." Instead, they'll tell you, Biden's voters were voting for an end to the chaos and destructiveness of the Trump era, but also merely to install a sort of caretaker president who would do nothing more than repair all the damage to our institutions of government that the Trump administration left in its wake. That's it. Nothing more -- just fix all the problems Trump left behind, get us back to where we were before, and the entire country could just move on and begin to heal.

The big problem with this narrative is that it is just not true. Not in the slightest. Joe Biden's two big bills -- the infrastructure bill now on his desk awaiting his signature and the Build Back Better bill still stuck in the congressional sausage-making -- were exactly what he ran on. In fact, they are now just a smaller subset of what he ran on. He was actually much more ambitious as a candidate.

Continue Reading »

You'll have to excuse us, but even with all the other political shocks this week, the one that shocked us the most was reading that Congress is going to take the next week off. For Veterans' Day. No, seriously. It's not like they have any pressing business or anything, right? They probably need the whole week to lie back and relax and rest up -- so they'll be in real good shape for the extended Thanksgiving Day break, later this month.

Sorry, too snarky? You'll have to forgive us, but please everyone let's remember this moment when all the politicians whine on television, a few weeks hence: "But there's just no time to get everything done! We've got all these deadlines staring us in the face! Waaah! Poor us!" Please, let's all remember at that point that they all thought they deserved an entire week off at the beginning of November. For Veterans' Day -- a holiday that most workers don't even get a single day off for.

Continue Reading »

James Carville is getting a lot of online grief today because of an interview he did with the PBS NewsHour last night. He was one of three political experts who were asked by Judy Woodruff about what the off-off-year elections meant for politics moving forward. But while Carville was (as usual) rather blunt and insensitive in what he said, he does have a point worth defending.

This isn't even the first time I have defended Carville for making almost exactly the same point, in fact. Earlier in the year, Carville got some heat for an interview he did with Vox. Here was my summation of the three points Carville made:

Continue Reading »

Obviously, Democrats need to do something different over the next year if they're going to have any chance at all in the midterm elections. That was the overwhelming message from last night's dismal election returns. Because what they just tried pretty obviously didn't work. At least, on a small scale. The off-off-year elections which always follow a presidential year only include two statewide races, in New Jersey and Virginia. That is a very small slice of America, but it's all the data we have to work with, so the natural inclination is to draw national political lessons from it all. Some will wind up being correct, some won't. After reading some other people's opinions about last night, here are the ones I'm inclined to believe right now:

Continue Reading »

I'm not usually that a big fan of (or any kind of rosy-tinted optimist about) legislative compromises. Or incrementalism, in general. But the deal Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced today on prescription drug relief doesn't actually sound all that bad. It certainly has its drawbacks -- parts of it are incredibly limited, for one -- but it also will fundamentally change things to the point where improving upon the basic idea will only require a little future number-tweaking. Which seems good enough, at this point (and with this Congress). So I have to say: this is not too bad for "half a loaf."

Prescription drug pricing reform is complicated -- there are a lot of ideas how to achieve it and a lot of things that could be done to rein in the worst excesses of the pharmaceutical industry (of which there are legion). This bill won't attempt them all, but it will do enough of them to build a solid base that can be later improved upon.

Here's a quick rundown of three of the biggest features of the announced deal:

Continue Reading »

All eyes in the political world today are on Virginia. Whatever happens in tomorrow's gubernatorial election is going to, in large part, drive the entire political narrative for at least the next 3-to-6 months. If the Democrat wins, it will be seen as a sign that Republicans should worry that they may be permanently losing the suburban voters who defected from their party under Trump -- even without Trump on the ballot. If the Republican wins, it will be seen as a sign of a possible giant red wave in the midterm elections next year, and the triumph of Trumpism even when Trump isn't on the ballot. Neither of these storylines will be completely accurate -- voters' motivations are a lot more complicated than pundits like to imagine -- but these storylines will still dominate the political strategizing as we head into the midterm season. Which is why everyone is metaphorically holding their breath waiting to see the Virginia results.

Continue Reading »

After being too despondent last year to write a Hallowe'en column (which is understandable, since the reality of the situation -- with Trump possibly about to win a second term -- was so horrendously scary I found I just couldn't top it), we return this year with our slate of annual tales of horror, for those on both the right and the left.

So sit down, imagine me holding a flashlight under my chin in a darkened room or campsite somewhere, and let me terrify you right down to your toes.

One technical note before we begin, I thought the Jack O'Lanterns turned out decently this year, although for the first one, I could obviously have chosen a different subject matter (from the title alone, really). But that would have meant it couldn't have turned out "decently," so I chose a map of Virginia instead. The second one is pretty self-evident, though.

So again, sit back, relax, and prepare to be horrified and frightened half out of your wits (by my two spine-chilling scenarios to make people on both sides of the aisle go screaming into the night).

And I hope everyone has a safe and happy Hallowe'en this weekend!

Democratic Nightmare -- Team S & M

Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin simply cannot be budged in the negotiations over the Build Back Better bill. They keep making more and more new demands, slashing everything worthwhile in the bill to the absolute bone (or jettisoning them altogether) until it gets to the point that even Joe Biden gives up on "compromise." The sad reality is that what the tabloid papers start calling "Team S & M" has never been interested in seeing this bill pass in any form, which they finally make clear to everyone.

Because the Build Back Better bill collapses, the progressives take their own revenge by tanking the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Sinema was instrumental in negotiating. Which means congressional Democrats have spent roughly the past six or eight months accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Continue Reading »