Is Obama Pulling The Strings?

Back in August, I was frustrated that nothing was happening in the news, but at least I could justify it, because it was August. But as of this morning's headlines, still nothing. The big event is the death of fully vaxxed Colin Powell from COVID. But right after that, a major aggregator has Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus getting trolled for mask-shaming some dude in an elevator. Nothing's happening.

So this may be one reason for a steady stream of speculation about who's pulling President Biden's strings, mostly focusing on Barack Obama. Most recently, commentators have noted that Obama is campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia when Biden would probably be a net negative there.

The problem is that if Obama were in fact pulling Biden's strings, it's hard to imagine that Biden would be doing as disastrously as he is. But Obama himself reportedly said, “You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” Obama may be campaigning for McAuliffe, but as far as trying to negotiate the BBB deal among the feuding Democrats, he's nowhere to be found. Other people have the leverage there.

Respectable media is finally starting to notice that nothing's happening. The Washington Examiner has begun to catch up:

The House and Senate return to session next week and will have only 10 legislative days [actually eight] to meet an Oct. 31 deadline set to pass both the social welfare spending package and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The two measures, which make up the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, are in doubt.

. . . In an interview Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t commit to the Oct. 31 date she set just weeks ago.

“We’ll bring the bill to the floor when we have the votes to bring the bill to the floor,” the California Democrat told reporters at a San Francisco event touting the still-unwritten legislation.

In addition to getting the number of legislative days wrong, this story also illustrates the obtusenss of reporters on either end of the spectrum. The BBB is hardly "still unwritten". In 2009, the late Rush Limbaugh made an important point about Obamacare: he said that bill must have been drafted years earlier in think tanks, and the draft had long been circulating. The BBB agenda is the same. It's described, as it is above, as "the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda", but stories also say now and then that Sen Sanders, the self-described socialist, is the one who drafted it.

And likely Sanders himself had little to do with its actual content, except to endorse what other well-placed loonies had put into the draft, which a Limbaugh in health would be asserting now is likely a years-old pipe dream that Sanders and his allies could finally bring to the floor due to Pelosi's and Biden's weakness. But the pipe dream was something concocted in a time when the Democrats had bigger majorities. Their current control of congress is so thin that in both houses, tiny groups of recalcitrants in the low single digits can stall a putative juggernaut.

Right now, if anyone is pulling the strings, it's Sen Sinema. Everyone else is in a fantasy.