The Biden-Harris mandate: fight for your own side!

Heather Cox Richardson gives us this historical reminder in a 12/01/2020 Facebook post:

There is an increasing feeling of desperation coming from the White House. Trump continues to insist he won the 2020 election, although the states whose results he has challenged have all certified their votes for Joe Biden. Biden has tallied more than 6 million votes more than Trump, including significant majorities in all the states Trump claims, in the biggest win for a candidate challenging an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged Herbert Hoover in 1932. [my emphasis]

Biden got a mandate for change. He needs to use it to maximum effect. The mandate is not to kiss up to intransigent Republicans or to spend two years seeking an impossible goal of harmonious Bipartisanship. It's to get constructive things done that a Republican President wouldn't even attempt.

The policies on which he won a mandate are laid out the Democrats' unity program.

Only a tiny fraction of Democratic voters will have read even a few pages of that document, which is an all-too-typical Democratic laundry-list rather than a thematic manifesto of some kind.

But there are some painfully obvious priorities for the new administration to address the mandate for substantive change:

• getting a grip on the COVID-19 pandemic, including immediate aid to individual and state/local governments
• make visible and effective public investments to combat the economic depression under way and stop the wave of evictions and mortgage defaults that are a part of it
• start getting real about the climate crisis
• make the Post Office function normally
• stop brutalizing and terrorizing refugees and other immigrants
• make serious federal efforts to hold local governments and individual police officers responsible for racial murders
• limit the flood of big-donor money poisoning and corrupting American politics.

And to achieve any of these things, the Biden-Harris Administration will have to fight the Republicans, who will try to obstruct it all. With today's authoritarian, Trumpified, QAnon-ized, Mitch McConnell-led Republican Party, there isn't going to be any broad consensus from large bipartisan majorities on anything more controversial that Mother's Day resolutions. And the Republicans may even try to load that up with some poison-pill rightwing content.

Biden and Harris will have to do some serious political arm-twisting and be far more effective than the Obama-Biden Administration was in mobilizing public opinion to support vital legislation. They will have to rely on Executive action for at least mitigation measures when Congress blocks legislation.

And they will have to be perceived by their own base voters and the public more generally as clearly fighting for their own side.

It shouldn't be necessary to state something so basic. But after the Obama-Biden Administration's weak, bizarre, failed pursuit of Bipartisanship for its own sake, it does need to be stated explicitly.

Jeff Spross stressed the importance of establishing a stronger reputation of the Democratic Party for supporting policies for the good of ordinary people and showing it will fight against the Republicans to achieve them (Joe Biden’s Four-Year Plan The American Prospect 11/10/2020):

Drawing on history, political science has a pretty good idea what specific characteristics policies should have to create that feedback of voter goodwill leading to large, durable majorities. Social Security and Medicare are the gold standard: benefits that are generous, that go to large swaths of the population, and that are designed and delivered in a straightforward way, so that voters can clearly see they’ve received the benefit, and from whom. As a demographic, seniors moved from an irrelevance to a major electoral force because those policies gave them a stake in governance and something to fight for, plus the resources and material freedom to engage with politics and to organize.

Unfortunately, even when they’ve held total power, Democrats have spent the last several decades deliberately avoiding policy designs that do this. They’ve approached big, ambitious public investment with trepidation; they’ve gravitated toward programs, such as Obamacare and endless tax credits, that are targeted, modest, delayed by years, and delivered through byzantine systems. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us that many such actions can be accomplished by Executive action:

If Biden’s White House feels like getting really ambitious, law and public-policy professor Robert Hockett recently argued that many aspects of a major infrastructure bill and a Green New Deal could be accomplished with powers already at the disposal of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. There’s even a section of law that says the executive branch can give anyone Medicare coverage if they’ve suffered a harmful “environmental exposure.” Since the whole country is at risk from a pandemic right now … Medicare for All by presidential decree, anyone?

It's obvious that such benefit programs are better established by legislation than by Executive action because that makes them more durable and more reliable in the minds of the public.

But Biden-Harris should use the opportunity to take such actions, for instance, by extending Medicare coverage to people who have been suffered serious symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Put the Republicans in the position of condemning that action and threatening to take it away if they regain the Presidency. Fight for your own side.

Bracing for a Biden Presidency

Here are some various thoughts on the Presidential election, as Trump is Sieg Heil-ing himself as the winner. Although at this moment on Thursday, it looks like Biden will be the winner.



The class-vs-other-identities debate will go on. But the Democrats need to build the party infrastructure - and by that I mean get people involved at the grassroots level - and Biden as President needs to support that effort. Repeating the 2009-2017 approach is not acceptable: Mara Liasson, The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why NPR 03/04/2016; Stanley Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats? New York Times 12/23/2016.

The Democrats need leaders who will fight Republicans. Nancy Pelosi is no longer one of them: Alexander Sammon writes (It’s Time for an Overhaul of House Democratic Leadership The American Prospect 11/05/2020):

Votes are still being tallied, but we already know for certain that election night was a disaster for House Democrats. As it stands, on a night where Democrats were forecast to pick up as many as 20 seats in the chamber, not a single GOP incumbent has been defeated. The only two Democratic pickups thus far can be chalked up to court-mandated changes to congressional district maps in North Carolina. While Democrats will likely keep the House majority, it’s possible they will lose between 7 and 12 seats in total, underperforming optimistic projections by 30 seats or more. The final count, whenever it comes in, will merely tell us how bad the bleeding is.

That result is stunning, after House leadership spent the summer all but assuring an expansion of the considerable mandate they won in 2018, when they flipped 40 seats in the House. Many of those freshmen who flipped those seats two years ago now find themselves on the ropes, struggling to hold on for the possibility of a second term. The vaunted rise of the suburbs, touted by moderate pundits as the surest path to Democratic victory, ran aground... [my emphasis]

The post-election moment is weird enough that the man Digby Parton refers to as Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, manages to make sense. An additional case of the Rick Perry Principle: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

I mean, it's Friedman, so he can't resist tossing in a dig at those scary leftist colleges and their Political Correctness. But this part isn't bad (There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America. New York Times 11/04/2020)

... Democrats have a lot to rethink, said Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.”

“Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,” Sandel told me, “the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event a sa pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.”

Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift.

The invisible elves and sprites known to establishment Democrats as "moderate Republicsns" still stubbornly fail to reveal their presence. Charlie Pierce goes to town on their most prominent advocates (The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election Esquire Politics Blog 11/04/2020):

Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?

Its various iterations — The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump — made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.

Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere. [my emphasis in bold]

On that last thought, I also assume that Trump will style himself as the American Juan Guaidó, President-in-exile who doesn't actually have to go into exile. Although if justice is allowed to run its course, Trump make seek asylum in a country with no extradition treaty with the US.

The New York Times and the "Democratic establishment": stenography or trolling?

Don't miss this classic piece of stenography journalism in the New York Times: By Lisa Lerer and Reid Egstein, Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders 02/27/2020.

They write, “Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders's candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance.”

Wait, what about The Resistance? You know, Party Unity against the unique menace to democracy represented by Donald Trump and all that?

But at least the New York Times recognizes that the "Democratic Establishment" is really A Thing.

This is especially entertaining: “A number of superdelegates dream of a savior candidate who is not now in the race, perhaps [Ohio Sen. Sherrod] Brown, or maybe someone who already dropped out the race, like Senator Kamala Harris of California.”

I'm trying to imagine if their sources actually managed to tell them with straight faces: So, Sanders gets to ‎Milwaukee with 45% of the delegates, and the convention votes to nominate Kamala the Cop instead. It's brilliant, man!

Yeah, that’s gonna happen ...

That fantasy also may be circumstantial evidence that use of hallucinatory chemical substances may be common among this “Democratic establishment.”

A lot of the article consists of various angles arguing against Sanders' position that the candidate that comes into the convention with a plurality of delegates should get the nomination. Of course, everyone tries to frame it in terms of high principle. But it's actually a tactical issue. If one of the other candidates besides Sanders was the most likely to get a plurality on the first ballot, they would be taking the position he's taking now and Sanders himself would be arguing that the convention needs to make its own decision despite the plurality.

Lerer and Egstein define their version of the "Democratic establishment": “The Times has interviewed 93 party officials - all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention.” along with, of course, various party big names that for shorthand we could call Bloomberg supporters.

Also, I was happy to see this mention of a group of which I'm part, "“Superdelegates from Democrats Abroad count as half a vote each.” Democrats Abroad counts as a state party so it also has DNC members. And WE ALL SUPPORT BERNIE SANDERS. Well, mostly, probably. At the 2016 convention, Democrats Abroad sent nine delegates for Sanders and four for Clinton.

This also provides some comic relief:

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce - either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

"She's the only person I can think of who can unify the party and help us win," he said. "This election is about saving the American experiment as a republic. It's also about saving the world. This is not an ordinary election." [my emphasis]

So the way to save the American Republic and the entire world is ... nominate Michelle Obama as Vice President?

They're just trolling us now.