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Why Democrats Don't Love Biden [1]

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Date: 2022-08-09

The Boise Range in Idaho.

While some of us are pretty excited about Joe Biden’s presidency, overall the voters are not enthused, according to the polls. On the whole Democrats don’t love Joe Biden even though he and this Congress have achieved a great deal. Trump and his Congress, who accomplished very little, were much more beloved by Republicans. What gives?

I see the problem as this: Democrats aim to make the country better, which is no easy task. Biden’s best work has improved the lives of a lot of people. But there’s always someone who doesn’t benefit, or who thinks he should have benefited more, or who thinks Biden shouldn’t have put this issue before that one. Boo.

When the Democrats in Congress try to nail down a bill to make the nation fairer, or cleaner, or more successful, the arguments go on and on. In order to get anything passed, they must yoke a proposal that one group likes and another does not to something the other group does want. That will bother someone else, so another provision goes into an ungainly omnibus bill that contains a little something for everyone but isn’t, on the whole, what anyone really meant. Boo.

Republicans don’t build. They break and they block. Their job is easy: stop the Democrats. Keep them from building something now. Break what they built before. They only need to remember one word that is right for every occasion: “NO!”

When they went after the ACA they promised to put in its place a “terrific” health care system. But they never even tried to do the real work of inventing one. They promised to build a wall — a physical “NO” — but never did the homework even for their own mean spirited plan. They did not consider the challenges of terrain, the damages to private property, the distance that they could feasibly cover, or the cleverness of desperate immigrants in bypassing it, much less the complicated reasons why immigrants are coming in the first place. They built enough wall to show their constituents photos of short segments of their big beautiful NO. Yay.

There are so many ways for Democrats to build, none of which will make everyone happy. When Democrats fail, they blame themselves for missing the mark. There’s pretty much just one way for Republicans to break and obstruct, and it will make everyone happy. When Republican fail to obstruct, as they did this week, they shift the blame to the incredible evilness of Democrats. They stir up the base’s hatred and fear so that the voters imagine that they stand together in a fantasy holy war against some dark specter of socialism. Yay again.

The thinking of many Democratic voters, unfortunately, isn’t more nuanced than that of Republican voters. “Did I get everything I wanted? No? Boo! Bad president! I’m gonna vote for someone else, anyone else!” We need to increase the understanding among Democrats that we can’t expect to get everything we want all at once. We need to learn to cheer for incremental progress, in spite of our disappointment that it isn’t all we had wished for, with even greater enthusiasm than Republicans have for breaking and blocking.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/9/2115423/-Why-Democrats-Don-t-Love-Biden

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