Opinion – Ezra Klein: Do Democrats deserve to be re-elected in the US?

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It is often said that hindsight is the moment of decision. As far as politics are concerned, I never believed that. Many analyzes are based on what I have come to regard as the counterfactual fallacy. It goes like this: the ruling party did X instead of Y. X didn’t work as well as Democrats or Republicans had hoped. They should have done Y.

We can only run the tape once. We can never know whether different decisions would lead us to a better world or worse results. But the elections force us to assess how the ruling party performed, despite the fact that we cannot know other ways.

And so, with Election Day approaching and voting already underway across the United States, I’ve been trying to craft my own answer to the question: How well did the Democrats fare with the power they had, given the constraints they faced?

I find it helpful to recall the three intertwined promises that the Democrats ran on. First, they promised to do competent governance and concerned with Covid. Second, they had a legislative agenda the size of Franklin Roosevelt, believing that this was a moment of rupture like the Great Depression, which demanded a new vision of what the state could and should do. And they ran on the promise of restoring America’s soul, re-establishing a civic promise and communal decency that Donald Trump and the GOP never understood and constantly betrayed.

Covid’s history is more mixed than I’d like. Judging by what was promised in 2020, the Biden administration has made remarkable strides. About 80% of Americans have had at least one vaccine, and anyone, anywhere in the country, can get shots and boosters with little trouble and no cost. The rapid tests were slowly rolling out, but they are here now, and for a while the government would ship them, free of charge, to your door. The US government has purchased more Paxlovid than any other country, and it is now widely available. Masks are cheap and plentiful.

But judging by what was possible by 2022, four of President Joe Biden’s former Covid advisers wrote in the Times that they “are deeply dismayed by what has been left undone.” The shift from emergency response to a new readiness architecture did not happen. Home testing has never been integrated into any kind of collective policy or data recording system. The budget for the government to provide tests directly has expired, with little protest from the White House.

Wastewater monitoring “remains uncoordinated and insufficiently standardized for a robust national surveillance system,” Biden’s former advisers wrote. Much more could have been done to improve the air quality inside buildings and make it clear which buildings meet the highest criteria.

After I criticized the Biden administration for not building on the successes of the Operation Warp Speed ​​program, I heard from its Covid coordinator, Ashish Jha, that the White House was lobbying Congress for $8 billion to create a Warp Speed-like vaccine program. of the next generation, called Covid Shield. But that move was silent, and the government committed itself to a bipartisan path that never opened up.

When Congress did not provide the money, the government did not go public, much less resort to tough measures. Biden could have refused to sign spending bills that didn’t include the Covid prep money he wanted. The Democrats should have made this a mandatory provision of the Inflation Reduction Act; as recent years have proven, there are few things worse for inflation than a raging pandemic.

The White House understands all of this. Jha is out there, even now, raising the alarm that current treatments are losing effectiveness and future variants will be able to avoid them more easily. “Lack of congressional funding made it difficult for us to replenish our medicine cabinet,” he said Wednesday.

“Because of the lack of congressional funding, the drug supply has really shrunk, and that puts vulnerable people at risk.” Republicans deserve contempt for refusing to fund pandemic preparedness. But the Democrats deserve prosecution for letting it become a priority among many.

To be fair, there was a lot more on the Democrats’ agenda. The central tension of Biden’s legislative strategy is that it combined ambitions of a staggering scale with majorities in Congress that barely existed. The Senate, in a technical sense, lacked a majority: it’s a 50-50 split, and Democrats only have votes because Vice President Kamala Harris has the constitutional authority to break ties. It’s remarkable how much the Democrats did, even so.

There were two sides to Biden’s long-term agenda: construction and care. The construction side – decarbonizing the country, building and repairing infrastructure and investing in semiconductor production and scientific research – was widely approved. And a lot of it is exciting.

Trump was much mocked for weeks of infrastructure that almost never resulted in new infrastructure. Biden and the Democrats set the stage for a decade of infrastructure that could transform what the United States does and how it is done. And to my surprise, Biden has put invention at the center of his policymaking, and while we still don’t know what fruit this will bring, it may be his most enduring legacy.

But the care side of Biden’s agenda — universal preschool, expanded tax credit for children, child and elder care subsidies, paid leave — has collapsed almost entirely (the only exception being an increase in Obamacare subsidies). Was this inevitable?

This is murky territory, given the mixed accounts Biden and Senator Joe Manchin gave of their negotiations. Was there really a $1.8 trillion package for Build Back Better that Manchin would have voted for? Biden’s team thought they had a deal. Manchin says they never did. And in the end, no one forced Manchin to decide that it wasn’t worth taking care of children and that it wasn’t worth reducing child poverty. That members of the Senate care so much about bridges and so little about bodies is a scandal.

Still, if you told me in 2020 that the next Democratic president would have a 50-50 Senate, with Manchin as the deciding vote and a House margin of just a few, I wouldn’t have predicted that Democrats could pass more than $100,000. 400 billion in climate investments, or significant corporate tax increases, or the most important infusion of money and capital into scientific research in a generation.

Three criticisms deserve to be published. One is that Democrats could have approved more of the assistance agenda by refusing to allow a separate vote on the infrastructure bill. The Biden administration now believes, and believed then, that it didn’t have enough votes to bring the two together. This strategy ran an unacceptable risk of nothing being approved. As Manchin has shown himself to be fully willing to kill off large parts of Biden’s agenda and leave the government spinning in the wind month after month, I suspect they are right. But there’s no way to really know.

Another is that the American Rescue Plan was too big and, however good the intentions behind it, was a servant of inflation. I think that the Biden administration got it wrong on the right side of the ledger. Unemployment is 3.5%. Workers received raises and stimulus checks. Poverty has dropped dramatically. The unemployed were not forced into destitution. All of that is easy to dismiss now, but nothing was guaranteed. And, with inflation at 10% in Germany and Great Britain and 7% in Canada, I am suspicious of explanations that place too much importance on legislation passed in one country.

I think a stronger thesis is that the Fed should have raised interest rates sooner and that Biden and the Democrats should have given less economic aid in the face of a pandemic that has frozen the global economy. Perhaps the rescue plan should have been armed with more automatic stabilizers so that aid would increase as unemployment rose and disappear more quickly if it went down. But that goes for all economic crises, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, Congress refuses to learn that lesson.

That leaves a criticism that I think is fairer: the Biden administration and congressional Democrats took a “more is better” approach to every piece of legislation they promoted. One reason the expanded tax credit for children quickly expired was that the bailout plan was chock full of policies that needed funding. One reason Build Back Better was difficult to defend was that there was so much content in the package that the main thing anyone knew about it was its price, $3.5 trillion.

Pressure for a package of democratic reforms was similarly unfocused. It included pretty much everything anyone worried about voting rights or campaign funding could think of, yet it still would have done little to block the kind of electoral subversion that Trump and his supporters attempted in 2020 and appear to be gathering the strength to try again. in 2024.

Biden has always framed 2020 as a fight for America’s soul, not just the steering wheel. This is more difficult to assess. I never believed he thought he could unite a divided nation. He is an optimist, but not a fantasist. On a more literal level, he did what he promised – ran a White House of low drama and low scandal and behaved with dignity and grace.

But Biden also ran a relatively silent administration. He gives comparatively few interviews, press conferences and speeches. He filled the position that Trump left, but not the space Trump occupied in the national debate.

I argued that Biden’s laid-back approach is, in a way, a strategy: By letting Trump and his successors occupy the airwaves, Biden and the Democrats remind their voters what’s at stake. But this strategy carries profound risks. Biden’s low-dramatic approach to leadership leaves room for Trump’s high-drama gimmicks.

What can be said, I think, is this: Biden and the Democrats have accomplished a lot, despite very narrow majorities. They have rolled out vaccines and treatments across the country, but we are still far from done with the pandemic preparedness work. They have run the government in a dignified and decent way, but we are still a long way from turning the page on Trump.

Next week, I’ll take a closer look at what Republicans are promising to do if given the power to do so. Because these elections are more than just a referendum. They are a choice.

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