If the GOP obstructs Biden, Democrats need to make them WEAR IT!
By: Ken Burch
Tags: Progressive Politics, Biden, Democratic Party

If the GOP obstructs Biden, Democrats need to make them WEAR IT!

There is a good chance that the GOP will still hold a slight majority in the U.S. Senate under a Biden presidency.

If the Senate GOP’s behavior under Mitch McConnell is any indication, they will essentially refuse to pass any legislation passed by the Democratic House or supported by the Biden Administration.

This means that there is a real possibility that, other than through executive orders-or a willingness to aggressively use the Defense Production Act to provide a Covid vaccine, once one is available, or to meet the countries other crucial needs, such as construction of “tiny house”-style public housing as a means to combat homelessness-it is possible that the country could approach the 2020 midterms with, essentially, nothing the Biden Administration seeks to achieve being done at all- even though the polls show overwhelming public support for the policies the Biden Administration was elected to implement by a popular vote majority that is now over 5,000,000.

If that appears to be what is happening, the Biden Administration, despite its endless talk of “working across the aisle”, will need to recognize that the aisle is, at the moment, the 21st Century equivalent of the Berlin Wall, with the Senate GOP playing the role of East Germany in that scenario.

For the last two Democratic presidencies, the GOP used the disproportionate power it had in a minority in both chambers-allying with the right wing of the Democratic caucuses- to block as much of the agenda of those presidencies as possible. The Democratic leadership in Congress, the Democratic administrations of the day, and the Democratic Party as a national political party could have used this situation to mobilize both the Democratic base and the large number of younger voters who were moving towards progressive and even radical political views to go to the polls at the midterms to reduce the strength of the GOP/right-wing Dem obstructionists and create Congressional majorities for substantive, long-term change.

The Democratic leaderships of those eras did not even try to do this.

Instead, they essentially told the base and the activists “shut up and take what you are given. You had no right to expect anything from us. But you STILL owe us your votes, though we don’t owe you anything”.

Instead of fighting hard to try and win the midterms by mobilizing the base-as Republicans always do- the Democrats, in dismissing the base and treating it as if it doesn’t matter, essentially conceded defeat in the midterms before the campaigns began, allowing the GOP to write and control the narrative and the terms of debate during the midterm campaigns, creating a dynamic in which the Right brought passion and energy to its side of the midterms, but the Democratic side brought-nothing. Nothing at all.

Instead of admitting they needed the base and owed something, respect if nothing else, to that base, they did what the big donors wanted and kept the base at as much distance as possible, treating the base with as little respect as possible, giving the base as little reason to vote as possible in the midterms.

In making these choices the Democratic establishment caused what they KNEW this approach would cause: massive abstentions in the Democratic base, the base some Democratic leaders-such as Rahm Emmanuel in his immortally obscene way-refuse to accept exists, but the base without which the Democratic Party would never come close to winning any election at any level.

They made this choice in 1994, and lost both houses of Congress by keeping the base at arm’s length while the GOP fired up their base.

They made this choice again in 2010,knowing there was no possibility other than the 1994 result being repeated.

In each case, the midterm result largely ended anything Democratic about either the Clinton or Obama presidencies, and in both cases the incumbent president made no real effort after that first midterm to fight to restore a Democratic majority in either house.

There is every reason to think that the Biden strategists would be content to repeat this self-destructive choice again, even in a situation like the one we will have in 2022-when many more Republican Senate seats will be up for re-election than 2020 and when first-term GOP congressmembers will be vulnerable to defeat if the Democrats run a campaign that holds them responsible for widespread fedeal inaction.

If a narrow GOP majority does still exist after the Georgia runoffss, and that narrow GOP majority prevents the Biden Administration from, quite frankly, getting much of anything through Congress, the strategists it chooses to run the Democratic National Committee, will consign President Biden to failure if they choose the same path, if they once again run a campaign focused solely on “suburban” voters, if they once again keep the base at a distance, if they keep talking about “reaching across the aisle” in a Congress where nobody on the GOP side is interested in doing anything in response to outstretched Democratic hands other than chopping them off as quickly as possible.

The only way to prevent a repeat of this scenario, a scenario that can only end with the Democrats losing the White House in 2024 because they were blocked from doing anything positive, would be for the Democratic Party to do things it NEVER does during midterms held under a Democratic presidency:

Fighting to win-and fighting to win by fighting to win the argument on the issues Making an all-out attack on the GOP as obstructionists, as the party that is actually responsible for preventing action. Identifying with the Democratic base-people of color, the poor of all races, union labor, farmworkers, all those left out in the cold by the post-1980 status quo- and getting those voters to the polls by making it clear that the party values them at least as much as it values corporate donors and CEO’s

To do the first, Democrats have to start from the assumption that Democratic ideas, including PROGRESSIVE Democratic ideas, are valid, are popular, and are worth defending under attack.

This means getting out there and say “Hell Yes, I support these things, I’m proud to support them, and here’s why they are good for the country!” It means being willing to speak out for ideas that may not, in the short-term be popular and making a case for why they are to the greater good. It means actually standing for something.

To do the second, the party needs to be running ads, constantly, and holding rallies(once Covid is controlled) constantly at which they remind the voters and potential voters of everything the GOP is preventing from happening, and reminding the voters of how much they would benefit if the ideas the GOP will block were actually implemented. If Dems get a nominal majority, it means that the Democratic leadership needs to make the GOP filibuster for real, rather than simply letting bills die when the GOP announces a filibuster- and they holding events or rallies where people watch the GOP talk good bills to death for hours and hours and hours.

To do the third will be the toughest. The Democratic establishment has convinced itself that the base and the young progressives who came out of the post-1998 protests against neoliberalism, Occupy, and the Sanders movement are, even put together, a permanent minority- that Democrats can only win if they get the votes of a sliver of the GOP- it’s worth noting that, despite all the GOP endorsements, the Biden-Harris ticket did no better among GOP voters than in any other year- and that the only way to get that minority is to promise to leave the base mostly out in the cold.

The truth is that Biden was elected solely by a coalition of the base and Sanders supporters. Support for the Green Party ticket collapsed in this election and no other small left third-party made a significant showing at all. The Sanders supporters who did not show up at the polls in 2016 did show up this year, and there was a sizable increase in turnout among the Democratic base as well, even though Biden, for reasons no one other than himself was to blame for, lost ground among Hispanic/Latinx and even Black voters.

The way forward now for Democrats is to understand why Biden had trouble with those constituencies and even, for whatever bizarre reason, with LGBTQ voters. The key to a strong showing in the midterms for Dems is reconnectin with those voters, and finding a way, at last, to get to an actual working relationship, an actual coalition, with the young progressives who support AOC and “the Squad” and who believe that it’s possible to create a better and different way of running this country.

To avoid a repeat of the 1994 and 2010 midterm wipeouts, the Democrats need to fire up the base in the way they have always refused to fire it up in the midterms and to get to a respect-based relationship based on meeting each other halfway with young Sanders voters. The midterms can be won by standing for something, by engaging with the base rather than keeping it at a distance, and by finally listening to and finding a way to work with the young progressives that were shouted down in the ’20 primaries. Dems can win the midterms if they do that- if they say “Yes, We Can!” and mean it. They are doomed to lose them, yet again, if they once again say “No, We Can’t- But You Owe Us Your Vote Anyway!”.

Dems know what doesn’t work. They have an obligation to never do what doesn’t work again.