If you’re like most Americans, you don’t think Joe Biden is doing well as president. Inflation is out of control. His administration appears to lack any viable plan to control border crossing. The president’s gaffes alternate between the amusing and the alarming.
But things could always be worse – and they would be if Biden listened to his left-wing critics.
They look at Democrats’ low poll numbers and think the way to raise them is to go even further left and to be even more partisan. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx Democrat, recently said that Biden and other Democrats have erred by clinging to the outdated belief that bipartisan deals are possible. They are in danger of losing seats this fall, she claims, because they have catered to a dwindling group of independent voters rather than delivered for the party’s base.
That means they should play hardball with centrist Democrats such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Ocasio-Cortez thinks that the failure of the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” initiative vindicated the legislative strategy that she and other progressives pursued: holding up passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill the moderates wanted to pressure them to support the social spending bonanza in Build Back Better.
It’s a triply strange conclusion. First, the strategy failed: Progressives could not maintain the blockade against the infrastructure compromise. Second, a number of moderates indicated they were prepared to see both bills die rather than cave to the progressives. If the blockade had held, then, the result might have been no bills passed instead of one.