U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats discuss the 'Build Back Better Act' and climate investments during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Nov. 17.ELIZABETH FRANTZ/Reuters
They have the White House, having denied Donald J. Trump a second term. They have the Senate, in a situation where they can showcase the role and reach of the first female vice president. They have the House of Representatives, which the Constitution invests with the power of the purse and the power to originate tax bills. They have nothing but woes.
The Democrats are drowning in misery. That may be the understatement of the era. The Democratic-held House is a mess, with the Republican figure poised to inherit the Speaker’s gavel, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, polishing his message in an 8 hour 32 minute speech that had all the markings of a Senate filibuster. It was a spectacle almost without precedent in the chamber, where there are structures against such excesses, and having the unmistakable air of an audition for the power to rule the House in January, 2022.
Ordinarily the counsel in a time like this might be: Take a deep breath, Christmas is coming, invest yourself in a time of joy and glad tidings, the midterm congressional elections are still 11 months off. Not this year.
Supply chain delays and disruptions may make for a lean year under the tree, and Joe Biden already is girding to take the blame. Days before Black Friday, customarily a consumer grab-fest at shopper-filled stores, the White House distributed “three quick supply chain” talking points that underlined how Team Biden is playing defence this far out from the midterm congressional elections. Facing calls that he appoint a supply chain czar, Mr. Biden summoned leading grocers and merchandisers for a White House meeting Monday.
There’s a lot of blame to go around for the shortages in American stores, of course, but while the topic is blame, Republicans already are blaming Mr. Biden for the persistence of the coronavirus.
And being the person in charge, he’s being blamed for inflation as well, with this cutting talking point circulating from the Republican side: All that money sloshing around in the Biden infrastructure and social-spending bills is only fuelling inflation.
The irony is that Mr. Trump, virtually alone down in his Palm Beach aerie, has the profile of the shiny new object in American politics, the personification of the modern Republican Party, which he built in his own image. Meanwhile, Mr. Biden seems as if he is a remnant of old-style Democratic politics, as befitting his nearly half-century in public life, and despite adopting the issues of the time – concern about climate change, worries about income distribution, advocacy of LGBTQ rights – he seems encased in rust. He’s the political picture of Dorian Gray.
Both men are in their 70s. One seems old, the other new.
And the reaction to them is telling. The energized, progressive section of the Democratic Party is tolerant of, but not enthusiastic about, its party leader. The energized, Trump-inspired section of the Republican Party is enthusiastic about its leader and intolerant of party skeptics. Traditional Republicans want to cast their leader away like a defective old shoe. Traditional Democrats find their leader as acceptable as a comfortable old shoe, though they worry that the old soft shoe is a dance that no one wants to join any more.
Some of the Democrats’ crisis was predictable – and normal. The party holding the White House lost an average of 36 seats in the House in midterm elections from 1906 to 1982. Ronald Reagan, then the oldest president, had stratospheric approval ratings at the start of his administration (68 per cent in May, 1981, according to the Gallup poll) only to see the figure drop to 49 per cent at the end of that first year. (Mr. Biden is around 43 per cent at an equivalent point in his presidency, though the Omicron variant is only starting to spread, and it almost certainly won’t help the Biden ratings.) Things got even worse for Mr. Reagan in his second year and the Republicans lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm congressional elections. He began his third year at 35 per cent. And yet two years later, Mr. Reagan won a second term by a landslide.
No one predicts Mr. Biden will cruise to a landslide re-election, and indeed already Democrats are fretting that their President is too old, his political appeal is too antiquated, his Vice-President is too feckless to run against Mr. Trump or one of his populist acolytes, and the party’s bench on Capitol Hill and in the country’s governors’ chairs is too weak to offer up a compelling replacement for the 2024 presidential election.
It remains possible that the Democratic gloom is too pervasive. There remains the chance that the President’s woes are setting him up for troubles ahead that are so great that – contrary to expectations – he enjoys something of a recovery, a surprising septuagenarian surge. (He turns 80 a dozen days after the midterms.)
Losing the House, for example, would neutralize the power of the ultraprogressives and allow the failure to move forward on legislation to be blamed on the Republicans rather than on internecine Democratic struggles.
“In an ideal world you control the government with a large margin, but that’s not going to happen for the Democrats,” said Bruce E. Cain, a Stanford University political scientist. “Losing the House may have a silver lining for Biden. He wouldn’t have to arbitrate between the Democrats’ factions and at the same time the Republicans would have to put forward ideas to solve the country’s problems.”
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