What Are We Learning?

The thing that's struck me about the whole BIF-BBB drama of the past couple weeks is how much it keeps reminding me of the incompetence I saw at the tech companies I used to work for. The constantly repeating pattern is of organizations that have months to finish a project, but nothing gets done until the deadline is just days away. Then the bosses who let this happen cover it up with a frenzy of promises and happy talk until here's simply no option but to admit the whole scheme has collapsed.

One little-noticed vignette came out this week when it was revealed that Sen Manchin gave Sen Schumer a written version of his $1.5 trillion top line in July -- but Schumer neglected to tell Speaker Pelosi about it until just this past week. Then Pelosi's response was just to continue the happy talk about how we're gettring closer and closer until even she was finally forced to give up the game.

Why did Schumer not tell Pelosi about Manchin's top line in July? It seems to me that at minimum, it would have given both an idea of how big a task they had to accomplish and what sort of resources they'd need to accomplish it. Certainly they'd have been able to recognize that it would need more than the few days they had to get something done this week.

If I were to extrapolate back to the tech bosses I knew back in the day, it would be an indication of how little understanding they had of what real work amounted to and how ill-equipped they were to manage any significant effort. Their response was to ignore whatever wasn't happening and blithely assume it could all be fixed by "working all weekend" at some point down the road. This is exactly what we saw with Speaker Pelosi.

And then, astonishingly, when "working all weekend" didn't fix the problem, at the very last minute, they brought in the big gun -- Joe Biden. Biden would give a 40-minute pep talk, and they'd all come together.

How completely unrealistic this prospect was is indicated by the ground rules of the president's visit -- no press, no outsiders, no recording, no Zoom. It's clear that without a teleprompter, it would be too risky to have inadvertent gaffes, misspeaks, or lacunae get out. That in turn is an indication of what confidence insiders had in the prospect of Biden's visit accomplishing anything at all.

Related to this is the odd sense from public remarks by Reps Hoyer and Clyburn, the number two and three House Democrats, that Pelosi's frenzy of activity was meaningless -- Hoyer was perectly aware of the outcome from the start, and Clyburn wasn't even whipping the vote. This suggests to me that they have little confidence in Pelosi, nor, I would think, in her ability to manage the bills in the future.

“It’s not a success,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a brief interview Friday night. “We need to pass both these bills, that’s going to be our objective.”

For happy talk, this is pretty half-hearted. The story goes on,

While several Democrats hoped Biden’s rare appearance Friday — his first in-person huddle with House Democrats as president — would rally support for the $550 billion infrastructure bill, he actually did the opposite.

The infrastructure bill “ain’t going to happen until we reach an agreement on the next piece of legislation,” Biden declared in the private caucus meeting.

The announcement stunned Democrats, from moderates who have been promised a vote on the infrastructure bill from the leadership for weeks, to rank-and-file members who just wanted to know the next steps.

. . . "It was a shocking failure to meet the moment," added one Democratic moderate, who emerged disappointed that Biden hadn’t delivered a call to action for the caucus.

And this is Politico. The good news is that the people running the country right now are incompetent, and even some insiders know this. The bad news is that they're incompetent.