Biden’s Build Back Better: Dead, Dead, Dead.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the main obstacle to Democrats’ legislative plans. Source: Washington Post
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) has long been a thorn in the side of the Biden administration and the more progressive Senators of the Democratic Party. His latest pronouncement on February 1st that the Build Back Better act is “dead” is just the latest example. It is a serious blow to an administration and party that have struggled to maintain a positive image after a year of botched foreign policy, high inflation, a stubbornly persistent COVID-19 virus, and now the demise of Biden’s flagship bill. While on the surface, Manchin is the clear culprit for the bill’s failure to pass, there are deeper factors that have influenced Biden’s sluggish legislative start.
It may seem surprising that a President who received a record number of votes in the 2020 election should see his primary legislative goal so utterly stymied. Yet Democrats should be wary of assuming that 2020’s results amount to a political mandate. Much of Biden’s appeal came from being wedged between two politically polarizing extremes — on the left, the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and on the right, Donald Trump and his ilk. Biden did not campaign as a visionary, unlike his former running mate Barack Obama. Instead, he marketed the 2020 race as a battle over “the soul of the country,” and himself as the center Democrat that would guide America with a steady and moderate hand. Yet, in the view of former Republican Governor of Louisiana and current Wall Street Journal contributor Bobby Jindal, Biden’s Build Back Better plan proposes sweeping, “Sanders-style policies.” Whether they are the right policies for this time is a separate question. But Virginia Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger echoed Jindal’s sentiments: “Nobody elected him to be FDR. They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
The polling data for the 2020 election backs this idea up. While progressives may be eager to champion Biden’s election as signifying a broad leftward movement for the country, Biden made no significant gains over Hillary Clinton in traditionally progressive demographics. According to the PEW Research Center’s “validated voter” analysis of the 2020 election, significant gains among moderate suburbanites were responsible for Biden’s victory over Trump in comparison to Clinton’s loss in 2016. Particularly for Biden, moderates played a larger role in his victory than liberals. Because conservatives constitute a larger share of the electorate than liberals, Biden and the Democratic Party are more dependent on moderates than their Republican counterparts are. It is therefore not only naïve but also politically self-destructive to propose legislation that alienates or scorns one of the most important bases of the party.
It doesn’t help that the earlier stimulus bill passed in 2021 to the tune of $1.9 trillion dollars now seems to have contributed meaningfully to inflation. In the words of the Washington Post’s Caroline Rampell, who supported the bill originally, “Congress sent the states more money than they knew what to do with.” And among the recipients of the round of stimulus payments that came with the bill were “many high-income households that were financially unscathed by the pandemic and perhaps even improved their finances.” And while Build Back Better is projected to have little effect on inflation, the damage from the previous bill seems to have been done. Simply put, Biden’s administration and his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate tried to spend political capital they didn’t have by attempting to pass the Build Back Better bill.
Democrats, who still havehope for the bill, must now consider the political risk of reopening an intraparty battle when other pressing matters, such as abill to increase competition with China andanother to reauthorize the 1990s Violence Against Women Act, currently take center stage. And while some progressives arepushing for a March 1st deadline — in time for Biden’s State of the Union — to resurrect the bill, Biden also has the opportunity toappoint a new Supreme Court Justice, a rare chance for a political win amidst current chaos. It will be extremely difficult for Democrats to accomplish all of the above goals while swimming against the current of low trust in the current administration’s vision for America and its capability to execute on that vision. If the Democrats in the White House and Congress wish to make progress, they will need to be considerably more politically savvy than they have been so far.