From Tim Miller:
To the delight of Republican senators, Schumer plans to make Democratic senators vote on abortion legislation that is both unpopular—it would legalize abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, a position most Americans disapprove of—and hopeless, since it does not have the votes to pass.
Here’s a tip: If you are going to force everyone to take a meaningless messaging vote for public-relations purposes, consider choosing a bill that hurts the other party’s popularity, not your own!
Democrats have the political advantage in the wake of what most Americans perceive as judicial overreach if the court overturns Roe. But they seem not to understand the moment and how best to take advantage of it. Instead of opposing a right-wing absolutism with sanity and moderation, they are matching it with Left-wing absolutism. Talk about living in an elitist bubble.
I wrote the other day about how the Democrats' political malpractice in losing the white working class began in their full throated endorsement of a NARAL absolutist version of abortion rights in the 70s and then their endorsement of Neoliberal ideas about free trade in the 90s. You'd think they would have learned a lesson or two by now, but they insist on living up to the worst stereotypes people who are not them, i.e., most average Americans, have of them. It's so much more fun to perform in the cosmopolitan moral outrage game than to think strategically.
Because the alternative is truly so horrifying, we really need the Democrats to win this year and in '24. But they seem to have leadership that is bent on destroying any hope of winning the decisive vote moderates on Main Street will deliver. Sane Main Street folks mostly have no idea of the peril that the Republicans are putting us in; they just want to believe that a return to some level of decency and normalcy is a possibility. Democrats need to understand that the absolutist pro-choice position does not help them in that regard.
This dismaying level of Democrat ineptitude is really the larger point that Miller is making in the post excerpted above:
When it comes right down to it, I find it hard to to see the current legislative logjam as anything but a monumental failure on the part of Chuck Schumer and Democratic leadership . . . with a fail assist given out to the White House for chilling in the back seat while their Build Back Bettermobile veers over the median and into oncoming traffic.
It’s not as if they couldn’t have seen this coming. They had only the one cheat code [reconciliation], and there were only two senators who needed to get brought on board in order to use it. Cut a deal and get ’er done.
This is 101-level politicking.
Sure Manchin and Sinema don’t seem to have been the most fun to deal with. But any Democrat with a brain had to recognize that to get something passed they would eventually need to stop moaning about how unfair it all is, recognize that a magic filibusting fairy wasn’t going to save them, and get Manchinema to the table to produce the best deal they could muster.
But nearly a year and a half has gone by, wasted.
Time is running out. If Schumer isn’t capable of getting a deal done by Memorial Day, Senate Democrats should find someone else who can. Otherwise they are going to butt fumble away both their majority and their agenda without even using the one weird trick that could’ve let them get something done.
Main Street Americans will not reject BBB because it is bad policy, which it is not, but because it is being proposed by a party they identify with a cosmopolitan cultural Left they feel no affinity with and so cannot trust.