Democrats need to take delivering for their base far more seriously

The American Prospect has three current articles addressing Some Big Picture issues with Democratic Party leadership.

Bob Kuttner in The Biden Paradox 11/30/2021 addresses a much-discussed theme: "Democrats are barely a majority party today mainly because they stopped delivering for the working class and instead got into bed with financial elites and neoliberal ideology. And that slow, lethal descent began under Jimmy Carter."

Kuttner is talking about voting results here. The policy positions that non-Manchinema Democrats advocate are generally very popular, often among a majority of Republicans. He is responding more specifically to arguments from Jonathan Chait. And also gets in a bit of snark at now chronically-centrist Chait: "An emblematic article, by New York magazine’s Jon Chait, a Prospect alum (where did we go wrong?) gets the story about half-right.

The Chait article he's citing is Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze 11/22/2021. Kuttner's main point is that, yes, the Democratic Party has to simultaneously address racial and social-justice issues in a ways that at least partially respond to the priorities of their voting base while addressing in a credible way economic and social problems that affect working-class voters of all races and ethnicities. While Kuttner himself doesn't exactly say it this way, the Democrats need to show white working class voters that they can deliver benefits to them that are greater than whatever satisfaction or comfort they might find in social and racial demagogy from the Republicans, e.g., "critical race theory!!!"

And he ends the piece with a bit more snark:

We need to fight like hell to get as much of the Biden program enacted, and then to rally voters who voted more heavily for Democrats in 2018 and 2020 than for Republicans, and can do so again in 2022 once they grasp the alternative. And we need some self-discipline on the part of a fractious coalition. What other course is there? Repairing to a mushy center surely won’t help.

At points in his article, Chait usefully distinguishes between the majoritarian New Deal mainstream, cultural radicals, and corporate shills. At other points, he blames an undifferentiated “progressive left.” If he were still at the Prospect, his piece would have been subjected to several queries, fact checks, and a good edit.

Harold Meyerson in Biden the Silent 11/30/2021 picks up on Kuttner's points. He makes an argument that I think is valid, even though some centrists will no doubt ridicule it as the "Green Lantern theory" of the Presidency:

What Biden hasn’t done is seize the bully pulpit as only a president can. Last week, my colleague David Dayen, in writing about how corporations are hiking their profit margins under the cover of inflation and supply-chain gridlock, noted that JFK, when confronted with an inflationary price hike from U.S. Steel, secured national prime-time all-network coverage of an address he delivered from the Oval Office attacking the company for raising the cost of living despite its pledge not to.

But it's not just a matter of Biden giving more prominent speeches. With Manchinema and the Senate filibuster ruling acting as huge roadblocks against his legislative program, he also needs to step up Executive actions, like forgiving federal student debt.

And Alexander Sammon takes a look at one of the senior Democratic leaders in the House, . (Succession 11/30/2021) As Sammon notes, Jeffries is the conventionally presumed successor to Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader when she retires. Jeffries is not likely to be a rousing progressive leader in such as role:

Jeffries was the leading congressional recipient of hedge fund money in 2020. He banked $1.1 million from the financial sector, real estate interests, and insurance industry in the 2019–2020 cycle. Everyone from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone contributed. Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund, is one of Jeffries’s top donors in 2021.

Democratic leadership matters.