Elected Democrats Are Conformist Enablers of Biden for 2024
But on Capitol Hill, all’s quiet on the Democratic front.
A gap has grown vast between current assessments from media, largely based
on voter opinion data, and current public claims from congressional
Democrats who keep their nose to the talking-points grindstone. An effect
is that party leaders and backbenchers alike are losing credibility with
the party’s base.
The gap is so lopsided that a
poll
this month found 67 percent of “Democrats and Democratic-leaning
independent voters” said they don’t want Biden to run again. Meanwhile, no
more than 1 percent of Democrats in Congress are willing to say so in
public. By any measure, a disconnect between 67 and 1 percent is, uh,
substantial.
For Democratic lawmakers to be so untethered from the people who elected
them tells you a lot about the compliant relationship that usually prevails
among elected Democrats toward President Biden. And it signifies an
unhealthy relationship between Democrats in office and the party’s activist
base.
While supposedly representing a progressive grassroots base to the
political establishment, some members of Congress end up routinely
representing the political establishment to the progressive grassroots
base.
The dire need for progressive advances in government policies is undermined
when elected Democrats reflexively echo the Biden 2024 campaign line and
pretend that he’s a sufficiently strong candidate to defeat the neofascist
Republican Party next year. When deferring to congressional Democrats who
in turn defer to the man in the Oval Office, progressive activists and
organizations end up functioning more like supplicants than constituents in
a representative democracy.
Top Democrats and their allies have publicly
touted the canard
that cast Joe Biden as a hero of last year’s midterms. The intoxication
from that messaging was in sharp contrast to the sober clarity from a
re-elected House Democrat who spoke to the New York Times “on the condition
of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the White House.” The newspaper
reported
that the congressmember said “Biden’s numbers were ‘a huge drag’ on
Democratic candidates, who won in spite of the president not thanks to
him.”
Polling in the 10 months since then indicates that Biden would likely be an
even huger drag on Democratic candidates a year from now. But hope springs
eternal, and so does fear of angering the White House. With the start of
presidential primaries just a few months away, the crux of the matter is
that Democrats in Congress are opting for self-focused, risk-averse
conformity rather than visionary leadership.
Now -- while even pro-Biden media like CNN and MSNBC are, at last, sounding
more realistic about Biden’s severe electoral deficits -- prominent
Democrats are either keeping quiet about the grim odds of a 2024 political
train wreck or are spouting feel-good nonsense worthy of the myopic
Mr. Magoo
. The more that Democrats in the House and Senate declare how great Biden
will be as the party’s standard-bearer next year, the more it seems they’ve
been swallowed up by a Capitol Hill bubble.
Yet mainstream media outlets are now
underscoring
the wide distance between the Democratic players on the Hill and the
Democratic voters who’ve put them there. NBC News brought it all into
focus,
summing up
: “When party elites look at President Joe Biden, they see the second
coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. When voters view the president, many see
an old man.”
More importantly, many hear timeworn ideas and promises that ring hollow.
Working-class voters can see and hear a president who has refused to really
fight for their economic interests, while
corporate greed
has been
raising prices
. It’s an invitation to eye-rolling from core Democratic constituencies
when Biden and his advocates proclaim how he’s going to go all-out to fight
for their interests in the second term after he hasn’t done so in the
first.
To Democratic officeholders, worried about retaining the presidency and
their own seats, such matters might seem relatively unimportant. But bleak
electoral consequences are foreseeable. Biden has declined to use the bully
pulpit to battle for progressive measures that are poll-tested and popular
with the electorate.
Democrats in Congress have ample reasons to be apprehensive about next
year. But their silences and spin increasingly make them look more like PR
specialists than leaders. The more they prop up Joe Biden to run for
re-election, the better Donald Trump likes the odds he’ll return to the
White House.
____________________________________
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many
books including War Made Easy. His latest book,
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its
Military Machine
, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.
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