If the Democrats end
up losing both the House and the Senate, an outcome that looks more likely than
it did a month ago, there will be nothing particularly shocking about the
result. The incumbent president’s party almost always suffers losses in the
midterms; the Democrats entered 2022 with thin majorities and a not-that-favorable
Senate map; and the Western world is dealing with a war-driven energy crunch
that is generally rough on incumbent parties, both liberal and conservative.
(Just ask poor Liz Truss.)
اضافة اعلان
But as an
exculpating narrative for the Biden administration, this goes only so far. Some
races will inevitably be settled on the margins, control of the Senate may be
as well, and on the margins there is always something a president could have
done differently to yield a better political result.
President Joe Biden’s case is no exception: The burdens of the midterms
have been heavier for Democrats than they needed to be because of three notable
failures, three specific courses that his White House set.
The first fateful
course began, as Matthew Continetti noted recently in The Washington Free
Beacon, in the initial days of the administration, when Biden made critical
decisions on energy and immigration that his party’s activists demanded: for
environmentalists, a moratorium on new oil-and-gas leases on public lands, and for
immigration advocates, a partial rollback of key Trump administration border
policies.
What followed in
both arenas was a crisis: first a surge of migration to the southern border,
then the surge in gas prices driven by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine.
There is endless
debate about how much the initial Biden policy shifts contributed to the twin
crises; a reasonable bet is that his immigration moves did help inspire the
migration surge, while his oil-lease policy will affect the price of gas in
2024 but did not change much in the current crunch.
But crucially,
both policy shifts framed these crises, however unintentionally, as things the
Biden administration sought: more illegal immigration and higher gas prices —
just what liberals always want! And then, instead of a dramatic attempt at
reframing, prioritizing domestic energy and border enforcement, the Biden White
House fiddled with optics and looked for temporary fixes: handing Kamala Harris
the border portfolio, turning the dials on the strategic petroleum reserve and
generally confirming the public’s existing bias that if you want a party to
take immigration enforcement and oil production seriously, you should vote
Republican.
A strong president, by definition, should be able to pull his party toward the center when politics demands it.
The second key
failure also belongs to the administration’s early days. In February 2021, when
congressional Democrats were preparing a $1.9 trillion stimulus, a group of
Republican senators counteroffered with a roughly $600 billion proposal. Flush
with overconfidence, the White House spurned the offer and pushed three times
as much money into the economy on a party-line vote.
What followed was
what a few dissenting center-left economists, led by Larry Summers, had
predicted: the worst acceleration of inflation in decades, almost certainly
exacerbated by the sheer scale of the relief bill. Whereas, had Biden taken the
Republicans up on their proposal or even simply counteroffered and begun
negotiations, he could have started his administration off on the bipartisan
footing his campaign had promised while hedging against the inflationary
dangers that ultimately arrived.
The third failure
is likewise a failure to hedge and triangulate, but this time on culture rather
than economic policy. Part of Biden’s appeal as a candidate was his
long-standing record as a social moderate — an old-school, center-left Catholic
rather than a zealous progressive.
His presidency has
offered multiple opportunities to actually inhabit the moderate persona. On
transgender issues, for instance, the increasing qualms of European countries
about puberty blockers offered potential cover for Biden to call for greater
caution around the use of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric teenagers.
Instead, his White House has chosen to effectively deny that any real debate
exists, positioning the administration to the left of Sweden.
Then there is the
Dobbs decision, whose unpopularity turned abortion into a likely political
winner for Democrats — provided, that is, that they could cast themselves as
moderates and Republicans as zealots.
Biden could have
led that effort, presenting positions he himself held in the past — support for
Roe v. Wade, but also for late-term restrictions and the Hyde Amendment — as
the natural national consensus, against the anti-abortion absolutism of
first-trimester bans. Instead, he receded and left Democratic candidates
carrying the activist line that absolutely no restrictions are permissible, an
unpopular position perfectly designed to squander the party’s post-Roe
advantage.
The question in
the last case, and to some extent with all these issues, is whether a more
moderate or triangulating Biden could have held his coalition together.
But
this question too often becomes an excuse for taking polarization and 50-50
politics for granted. A strong president, by definition, should be able to pull
his party toward the center when politics demands it. So if Biden feels he
cannot do that, it suggests that he has internalized his own weakness and
accepted in advance what probably awaits the Democrats next month: defeat.
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