Office Hours: How can things be going so well, and Biden and the Dems be doing so badly?
The paradox explained
In today’s Office Hours, I’d like to focus on a seeming paradox.
Lots of positive news: Unemployment is down, wages are up, consumer confidence is rebounding, and consumers are spending more (retail sales jumped 1.7 percent in October, the third monthly increase). COVID seems to be in retreat, at least among those who have been vaccinated. And two big parts of Biden’s legislative agenda — last spring’s $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan, and his recent $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan — have been enacted.
So what’s not to be happy about? Apparently, plenty. Biden’s current job approval rating is 12 points lower than when he took office — now just 41 percent (around where Trump was for most of his presidency). Most registered voters say that if the midterm elections were today, they'd support the Republican candidate. Even Trump beats Biden in hypothetical matchups. More than 60 percent of Americans say the Democrats are out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. And Republican congressional candidates now hold their largest lead in midterm election vote preferences dating back 40 years.
So what gives? How can the economic and pandemic news be so good, with so much of Biden’s agenda enacted — yet the public be so sour on Biden and the Democrats?
I’ve got my own theory about this, which I’ll share with you at 10 am PT, 1 pm ET. But I’d very much appreciate having yours. Please jump in.
I’ll add my thoughts to this lively and thoughtful discussion (can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying the community we’re creating here).
So why, amid all the good news, are Biden and the Democrats taking a beating? Some of you focus on Biden’s and the Democrat’s poor messaging. I agree it’s awful. Even now, most Americans have no idea what the “Build Back Better” package is. It sounds like infrastructure, but that bill has been enacted. “Human infrastructure” makes no sense to most people. Americans like the particulars in the package – childcare, universal pre-K, paid family leave, lower prescription drug prices, Medicare coverage for vision, hearing, and dental – and most favor measures to protect the climate. But the package isn’t understood, which has left it vulnerable to the worst kinds of demagoguery.
But this can’t be the major reason for the paradox because the Democrat’s failure at messaging goes back at least a half century. I remember in 1968 after Nixon beat Humphrey hearing that the Democrat’s problem was they talk policy while Americans want to hear values – exactly the same criticism of Democrats we’re hearing today. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were great orators but not great messengers. To my mind, the last Democrat who really knew how to communicate with passion and intensity, and lift up the nation while spelling out what needed to be done, was Robert F. Kennedy.
Some of you rightfully and understandably blame the media – not just despicable Fox News but also the corporate mainstream. I agree. But here, too, the problem goes back a long way. Even before Fox News, Rush Limbaugh was poisoning countless minds. And for at least four decades, the mainstream media has focused on conflict, controversy, sensationalism and scandal. Good news doesn’t make the grade.
So here again, we need to ask ourselves what’s new, now?
Some of you suggest that Democrats are just too self-satisfied, representing the college-educated suburban middle class who don’t want major social change. I think that’s right. But this isn't particularly new, either. As I’ve said before, Clinton and Obama abandoned the white working class by embracing trade, rejecting unions, subsidizing Wall Street and big business, and embracing deregulation and privatization.
So what explains the wide gap between how well the country is doing and how badly Biden and the Democrats are doing politically -- right now?
In two words: Dashed hopes. My sense is that after four years of Trump and a year and a half of deathly pandemic, most of the country was eager to put all the horror behind -- to start over, wipe the slate clean, heal the wounds, reboot America. Biden in his own calm way seemed the person to do it. And most of us were surprised and delighted that the Democrats retook the Senate. Our hopes and expectations soared.
But those hopes and expectations couldn’t possibly be achieved when all the underlying structural problems were still with us -- a nation deeply split, Trumpers still threatening democracy, racism rampant, corporate money still dominating much of politics, inequality still widening, inflation undermining wage gains, and COVID (in the form of the Delta variant) still claiming lives.
Dashed hopes make people angry. Mass disappointment is politically poisonous. Social psychologists have long understood that losing something of value generates more anger and disappointment than obtaining it in the first place generated happiness.
I think Biden and Democrats can take solace from this. Hopefully, a year from now the fruits of Biden’s initiatives will be felt, COVID will really be behind us, the bottlenecks behind the current inflation will be overcome, and the horrors of the Trump years will become more visible by Congress’s investigations and the midterm campaigns of Trumpers. Most importantly, America’s irrational expectation for quick deliverance from all our structural problems will have settled into a more sober understanding that resolving them will require a huge amount of work, from all of us. Then, I suspect, the nation will be better able to appreciate how far we’ve come in just two years from where we were.
A number of people here seem to think the problems the Democratic Party has is all about messaging. It isn’t.
On almost every issue of importance the Democratic Party has been willing to compromise benefits for working people off the table.
The reason that Democrats talk about messaging is that the Party is dominated by self satisfied upper middle class voters who control the Party and see nothing wrong with the status quo.
The majority of people in the US are not in that zone of satisfaction.
No amount of messaging can work when you are the party of Manchin and Sinema.
Just look who Biden let speak at the White House to celebrate the infrastructure bill—-Sinema.
The Party of Sinema isn’t going to win the 2022 election.