Why Biden won’t save the Democrats

Why is Biden’s pivot to the center so half-hearted?
Every so often, a snippet of news, an anecdote or data point crops up and puts the obsessions and hang-ups of America’s political class in perspective, instead offering a clarifying reminder of what voters actually care about. The latest NBC news poll is one such piece of evidence.

In a helpful framing of voters’ priorities ahead of the midterms, the survey asks whether support for a list of policies will make them more or less likely to back a given candidate. The most popular policies (i.e. those with the…

Why is Biden’s pivot to the center so half-hearted?

Every so often, a snippet of news, an anecdote or data point crops up and puts the obsessions and hang-ups of America’s political class in perspective, instead offering a clarifying reminder of what voters actually care about. The latest NBC news poll is one such piece of evidence.

In a helpful framing of voters’ priorities ahead of the midterms, the survey asks whether support for a list of policies will make them more or less likely to back a given candidate. The most popular policies (i.e. those with the biggest gap between the percentage who say it would make them more likely to support a candidate and those who say it would make them less likely), are: funding the police, expanding domestic oil and natural gas production, supporting bipartisan infrastructure legislation, lower costs for healthcare and prescription drugs, support for Roe v. Wade and a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The gaps between more likely and less likely for the first four of those are vast (+64 percent, +52 percent, +50 percent and +46 percent).

That survey makes the case for moderation on both sides of the aisle. But it is the Democrats, stuck with an unpopular president overseeing inflation that is more than negating wage increases and contemplating wipeout in the midterms later this year, who should be most worried.

At times, Biden appears to understand all of this. He reserved prime State of the Union real estate for a call to “fund the police” (though that it needed saying at all is his real problem). Once the climate change president who could hardly go a day without heralding the arrival of a green revolution, he can just about read the room enough to know that now isn’t the time to be lecturing Americans about net zero. But, in truth, Biden’s pivot to the center has been half-hearted.

Nowhere is this clearer than on inflation. At risk of sounding like a broken record, the White House — incredibly — still doesn’t seem to understand that they have no serious plan to address, or even to credibly appear to address, the number one concern of voters and the biggest economic problem in the country.

In an interview with the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, Larry Summers is scathing about Biden’s big push to solve rising prices by cracking down on corporate greed. Says the White House’s least favorite gloomster of the idea that the latter has anything to do with inflation: “I just don’t think that is supported by any serious understanding of how the business process works.” Blaming inflation on market power is, he says, “not serious economic reasoning and the judgments and forecasts of those who engage in that reasoning should be taken less seriously as a consequence.”

Meanwhile, Democratic elites are busy whipping themselves into a fury about what they have decided to characterize as Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill and the evils of Ron DeSantis when, as my colleague Amber Athey reports, a majority of Democratic voters, let alone independents, support the un-spun wording of the bill in question.

Biden is sticking to eye-watering spending plans in the face of rising prices and the real risk of stagflation. He will not repudiate woke orthodoxy in a way that would be popular with the average Democratic voter. And he dedicates too much White House to overblown, partisan narratives about the imminent collapse of American democracy. Why?

What explains this reluctance for Biden to go full moderate? The answer is what motivates Biden: a career-long pre-occupation with the health of the Democratic Party. Going too far would risk a more damaging and decisive falling out with the left. Yes, you and I may see that a proper scrap with the left might be just what his party needs. But that isn’t a chance that the man who has always positioned himself at the midpoint of his party is going to take.

*** Sign up to receive the DC Diary in your inbox on weekdays ***

Chesa Boudin’s recall conspiracy

Amidst growing disorder in his city and a sharp backlash from its residents, radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin is locked in a tough fight to survive a recall vote in June. Boudin was once the poster boy of the criminal justice reform movement but now faces a premature end to his time in office. If the arguments deployed by his defenders are anything to go by, Boudin is in trouble.

Standwithchesa.com, the website of the “No” campaign, characterizes the recall attempt as the work of “Republicans, the police union, and the ultra-wealthy” who are “banding together to overturn the results of the free and fair election of Chesa Boudin.” A reporter for Puck News wrote that “overturn the election” was “framing” that was “pretty strong” in a recent interview (h/t Charles Fain Lehman). Boudin agreed with this suggestion of a sinister conspiracy. “Absolutely,” he said. That prompts the question: what do Boudin and his supporters, or for that matter Puck’s Theodore Schleifer, think recall votes are for?

Tim Ryan has one word

Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has splashed the cash with a $3.3 million ad buy. The thirty-second spot is called “One Word,” with that one word being China. “It is us versus China, and instead of taking them on, Washington is wasting our time on stupid fights,” says Ryan. In a line that you’re more likely to hear from a Republican than a Democrat, Ryan says, “America can never be dependent on communist China.”

The message is tailored to Ohio, of course, a state that has been on the sharp end of America’s manufacturing decline and that’s grown redder and redder in recent election cycles. But with his unorthodox China message, Ryan, the clear frontrunner in the Democratic primary, is an interesting test case for what sort of message his party can alight on to appeal to the Rust Belt voters who were so central to the Trump revolution in 2016.