Think back to the roughly two-month interval between the 2020 election and Georgia’s Senate runoff elections. We were all relieved because the yawing garbage barge of spray-tan detritus and bad ideas was on its way back to the Florida swamps.
I don’t know about you, but in that moment, anyway, that was enough for me. Our ineluctable goose-step toward dipshit facism had been halted—temporarily, at least.
Fast-forward a year and change. Honestly, if you’d told me back then that we’d win both those seats; President Biden and the Democrats would pass a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill and a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill in the face of fierce MAGA opposition (after Bumblefuck Don failed to get his own infrastructure initiative off the tarmac in the previous four years); the unemployment rate would dip below 4%; and the administration would quickly roll out vaccines to every American, thereby saving the lives of people like me who really wanted their lives saved, I wouldn’t have just been happy. I would have been ecstatic.
On Sunday, Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd rolled out more disaster porn, strongly implying that Biden’s first year as president (again, it’s just his first year) was a cavalcade of humiliation involving nonstop wedgies and long nights spent cooling his heels in fusty high school gym lockers.
On the other hand … the much-needed bipartisan infrastructure bill will boost the economy for years to come. The $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill has already helped bring the economy storming back. Workers arguably have more leverage than they’ve had since Reagan, and more than 6.4 million jobs have been created. And, as longtime Democratic strategist James Carville notes in the following clip, Biden and the Democrats took a big bite out of child poverty—temporarily, anyway—no thanks to the GOP.
So what does Carville think we should do? Stop whining and tell people what we’ve done and plan to do in the future:
TODD: “You got a situation right now, the Biden coalition, nobody’s happy. Progressives aren’t happy now with how Build Back Better has gone, African American activists are not happy about how voting rights has gone, and if you look at the polling, honestly the thing that’s cratering the most are independents. You know, the folks that just wanted the temperature turned down. You’re the president. What do you fix first?”
CARVILLE: “… If you’re part of the Democratic base, if you don’t care about child poverty, if you don’t care about hourly workers, you’re really not a Democrat, all right? I think a lot of the Democratic base has not been told or informed of the things that President Biden and this Congress has accomplished, but to me, those are the things that if I’m a Democrat, I much more care about that than some word in a dictionary—that children are going to bed with a full stomach and a warm house. I care that somebody, an hourly worker, is not sitting there working away at $7.25 an hour, and I see these signs all over, even in Louisiana and south Mississippi—$700 signing bonus. Those are real accomplishments and it’s something that you can run on. And, again, you don’t talk about what you didn’t get. … Democrats whine too much, Chuck. Just quit being a whiny party and get out there and fight and tell people what you did, and tell people the exact truth: The Republican Party stands for nothing other than ‘let’s relitigate the 2020 election. Oh, let’s get back at Jamie Raskin.’ That’s it. That’s the entire platform.”
Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t gone away, and omicron has rewritten the script once again. But every country in the world has been blindsided by the omicron wave, and while MAGA mites may want to focus on the total number of deaths that have occurred under Biden as opposed to Trump, the most relevant comparison is how each president performed compared to the rest of the world. And by that measure, Biden has succeeded. (Also, Trump wasn’t forced to deal with a predecessor who claimed he didn’t really win the election, or millions of citizens so in thrall to an ex-”leader” that they’d rather kill themselves than give their “opponent” a win.)
The 2022 midterm campaign is looking like a slog right now, but things change—often when the future looks darkest. My hunch—and this is only a hunch—is that omicron will peter out as fast as it arrived, and with more people vaxxed and carrying natural immunity, the pandemic could end before the year is out. (No, this doesn’t mean you should go out and catch omicron. It still means you should get vaccinated.)
Will that help us in 2022? Maybe, maybe not. But as Carville notes, there’s plenty for Democrats to campaign on—and that’s without even mentioning Republicans’ increasing radicalization, the looming specter of a still-very-unpopular Trump, and the fact that the GOP finally succeeded in effectively ending Roe v. Wade.
No, Democrats didn’t deliver on everything they promised, but they promised a lot—whereas Republicans simply promise more poverty, chaos, gaslighting, and creeping fascism.
Carville—on this point, anyway—is right. We need to buck up. Better days are ahead. I can (almost) feel it.
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