THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

Last week’s newsletter included the backstory of how and why President Biden’s agenda got split in two and knotted up in the urgent need to increase the debt limit (which Republicans are, of course, taking hostage in the hope that it kills the Build Back Better act). 

A mess! But we’re still in the thick of it. So I want to zoom out a bit further, and reflect at some length on how it came to be that Democrats, with concurrent majorities and multiple existential challenges before them, may pass nothing at all, and even seem unsure how they’re going to stop the minority party from plunging the country into an economic calamity.

In a narrow view of things, the die was cast in November, when Democrats found themselves with at most 50 votes in the Senate, meaning in an optimal scenario they’d have zero to spare when trying to do anything Republicans opposed. This is the view you take if you want to avoid hard questions about the acumen of Democratic Party leaders, because it allows you to chalk everything up to chance and whimsy: Cal Cunningham couldn’t keep it in his pants. Kyrsten Sinema turns out to be a toxic egomaniac. This is just what the fates had in store. It’s a perspective that provides no insight into why the Democratic Party fields members like Sinema, or why its leaders coddle those members when they win. Who gave Sinema a six month joyride with Biden’s approval rating? Who, after she refused to lay out a negotiating position on the Build Back Better act, tried to placate her by fast-tracking her roads and bridges bill anyhow? Who, after she wrecked everything, will try to insulate her from a primary challenge?

When you draw back the lens, you realize we’re staring at the consequences of a large web of mistakes, not at a single one that arose in winter 2020. A flawed system of decision-making, not a single error. In spring of 2021, I knew that it was a mistake to bifurcate Biden’s agenda; that it was a feint to kill the larger half. I also knew that in a 50 vote Senate, Sinema and Joe Manchin had a lot of leverage; but I also, also knew that because of their unreliability, and because of the lessons of 2009, and because of the urgency of climate change and of renewing the temporary provisions of the American Rescue Plan, their right to freelance for the whole party needed at least to be conditioned on more concrete promises and firmer deadlines. 

If we could time travel there’s no single moment we could revisit that’d allow us to neatly untangle this mess; it’d require undoing decisions, messages, and candidate recruitments going back years. The Democratic leadership hasn’t meaningfully turned over in a decade and a half. It’s their party. Kyrsten Sinema didn’t do it on her own.

Of course, it’s still possible that despite all of her antics, we’ll come out on the other side of this OK. (Not, like, great, or whatever, but on two feet and with something to show for all the unpleasantness.)

Whether we do or not, though, it’s worth contemplating the decisions that brought us to the brink, and what kind of party might’ve made better ones. To wit:

• Why, after getting jerked around by Republicans for half a decade over the debt limit, did Dems passively increase it for Donald Trump without ever trying to neutralize it as a weapon?
   
• Why, after the grueling experience of 2009 (and everything after!) did the party not abandon the pursuit of bipartisanship as a public appeal and excise the bipartisan temptation from its DNA?
   
• Why, after the ACA implementation problems and years of seeing little return on policy choices, are Democrats still so taken with complex program designs, such as means testing?

Now please forgive me a lengthy digression. Matt Yglesias wrote an article last week arguing that the Democratic Party has missed its marks over the years because it has blinded itself to the fact that the median voter is a non-cosmopolitan, non-college white man in his 50s who lives in the suburbs. The fix for this, he argues, is for the party to constantly remind itself that the median voter is a non-college white man in his 50s who lives in the suburbs. I commend you to the article, but also see the situation somewhat differently. The problem isn’t that the party has abandoned median voter theory, it’s just that Matt and the Democratic establishment (and I for that matter) have different ideas about what successfully appealing to this composite median voter entails.

There’s an obvious sense in which heralding the virtues of bipartisanship, trying to seem reasonable (at least, relative to Republicans) is a way of broadcasting to some fictional center that Democrats are the goldilocks party. As a policy essentialist, Matt thinks they should be broadcasting reasonableness on a different channel, which is why, I gather, he published this essay by David Shor and Simon Bazelon arguing that Democrats should further means-test Biden’s child tax credit. 

The legislative problem the piece addresses is genuinely vexing. As enacted in the American Rescue Plan, the child-tax-credit program is already means tested (which means the administrative burdens of means testing are baked in). And because Democrats have only a limited amount of money to spend in their reconciliation bill, they can either make the program permanent for a smaller number of needier people, or they can time the existing program to sunset in a few years when (for all we know) Republicans will control enough of the government to just let it lapse altogether. 

That's a real dilemma. But the idea that this strategy, meant to mitigate policy churn in the medium term, is better politics in the immediate term is way underbaked. The main component of their argument is that a more steeply means-tested child tax credit polls better than the program as currently devised, so Democrats would gain a political dividend from limiting their largesse. To believe this, you have to make two assumptions about people, both of which I think are false: 1) that voters are highly attuned to policy details like whether the child tax credit phases out at $50,000 or $150,000; 2) that they all care about this question equally. “A higher threshold does win you the support of more parents with young children who would directly benefit from the program,” they argue. “But parents of young children are a distinct minority of the electorate, and phasing the benefit out sooner gains the support of more voters than it loses.” Irrespective of what people tell survey takers, I think that almost no voters, particularly childless voters, know where the actual child tax credit phases out; and the majority of them wouldn’t know or care if Democrats lowered the threshold. The exception would be the middle-income parents who just got the child tax credit and would then see it taken away. This strikes me as an extremely foolish way to appeal to non-college white men in their 50s who live in the suburbs, many of whom are known as dads. 

To me, all of this—what the Democrats do, and what the data-wonks advise—reflects huge misconceptions about how most people who aren’t weird nerds engage with politics. 

If Democrats required aides to cover their workspaces in Post-it notes reminding them that the median voter is a non-college white guy in his 50s who lives in the suburbs—and they appealed to that imaginary person in an effective and morally acceptable way—it might actually be a big boon to the party. But it wouldn’t look anything like ‘promising to reach across the aisle’ or ‘fine tuning the policy agenda until it all polls above 60 percent.’

Here (because we’re talking about a composite voter, not a real person or population) I’m going to cash in whatever cred I still carry from the fact that I grew up around a bunch of parents who resemble this everyman, and am friends with their children, some of whom are now approaching median-voter age: The kind of voters Democrats labor to appeal to (and that the popularists think they should do a better job appealing to) aren't going to choose a Democrat over a generic Republican on the basis of beltway pabulum about both sides working together, or of fine gradations in policy. Many of them actually think those kinds of things are phony and off-putting. They are, at best, meaningless to people whose most consistently held belief about electoral politics is that all politicians are crooks and we should throw the bums out. 

So what does appeal to this vague-ish middle that is also compatible with moral leadership? Well, here, for instance, is how Jon Tester presents himself to voters. What is Jon Tester’s policy agenda? You can read that here if you want, but as someone who follows Senate developments very closely my answer to the question was “hell if I know!” What I do know, because it’s what he broadcasts, is that he has a farm and isn’t afraid to (figuratively) pop lying, corrupt Washington politicians in the nose. I also know that he is a huge asset to the party who would never in a million years pull Sinema-esque antics or run scared from a debt-limit vote or abandon his culture-drenched appeals in favor of promoting further means testing of social spending. 

Some variation on that formula seems to buy way more good will than promising people what focus groups say they want. Sherrod Brown and Barack Obama are actual pointy-headed former college professors with complicated left-of-center policy visions, but they developed good political brands for themselves with a mix of working-class bromides, ethical conduct, and outsider positioning and it bought them tons of running room, without subjecting them to all the perverse traps that the bipartisanship fetish or “do popular things” can entail. If the whole party looked more like a (gender-balanced) collection of those three, it would solve a lot of problems—not just the immediate crises, but others going back years, and the looming crises of democracy on the horizon. But the way to channel their wisdom isn’t to run away from partisan ideals. And it isn’t to read a bunch of surveys, pretend to support the things that poll at 60+ (but only those!), and eventually find yourself endorsing wars and austerity when they inevitably poll well again.

What does all this have to do with the BIF and the BBB and the debt-limit hostage crisis?

Well, a lot I think. Not with the ultimate disposition of these big fights—for better or worse (spoiler: it’s worse) we’re stuck at the moment with the senators we have. But, for instance, it can help us understand why a situation where an unholy alliance between a handful of Democrats and corporate interests to kill the Biden agenda scans in media coverage as a matter of progressives being unreasonable. As others have noted, progressives have actually proven to be Biden’s most critical allies. Everyone’s just primed to blame progressives because of the hardened conventional wisdom that progressives refusing to trim their policy sails are the source of all Democratic woes. But who after looking back on the summer still thinks Pramila Jayapal would be a more reckless steward of the party's agenda and political fortunes than the centrists?

It also explains almost everything about how these fights came to overwhelm Democrats at a time when so much rides on the party seeming resolute and competent. A party with more Testers and fewer corporate Democrats would thrill at the opportunity to give voters money for child care and cheaper prescription drugs. Even if it still contained a few annoying members, a party like that would also have more senators, and thus a wider margin for error in passing the Biden agenda. 

Perhaps most importantly, though, a better-constituted party would make for a more muscular opposition to the GOP.

Even if everything works out OK in the end, we shouldn’t just agree to sweep the costs of the lost six months, and of the debt-limit fiasco, under the rug. We should use it as an opportunity to ask whether we should expect more savviness from Democratic leaders. For instance: At every juncture in the Trump years when Congress needed to increase the debt limit, Democrats were there to help; every time it happened, people like me pleaded with them to condition their votes on permanently neutralizing the debt limit one way or another, keenly aware that Republicans would turn right around and use it to mug the next Democratic president; and as best as I can tell, the leaders either never considered it, or dismissed it as a dangerous gambit that would make the party “seem” “unreasonable.” After all, everyone knows middle-aged non-college white suburban men love to play nice with people who jerk them around. Thus, they agreed to suspend the debt limit under Trump and time it to become a live threat again in the middle of Biden's first year in office.

That decision, along with the party's mindless indulgence of bipartisanship, has placed Biden's agenda on a collision course with the debt limit, and Democrats remain unwilling to eliminate the filibuster or the debt limit on their own.

Again, it might all work out OK. The sheer intensity of this pressure-cooker Democrats have assembled may create the conditions that saves them from themselves. Abolishing the filibuster might seem scare until they accept that the alternative is a great depression. Whatever else you might say about her, Nancy Pelosi is a reliable whip and seems to be an adrenaline junky during make-or-break legislative crises. But it didn't have to happen this way. The toll it's taken on the party was avoidable. And if instead of grappling with that, we escape this moment by the skin of our teeth, and herald our political leaders as geniuses for shepherding us through it, it'll happen again.