For Now, The Götterdämmerung Strategy Is Unchanged

Meaningful statements from President Biden and Speaker Pelosi about the outcomes of Tuesday's elections have been slow to emerge. Asked early Wednesday about whether the results changed the agenda for the House, Speaker Pelosi said, "No". And according to the AP,

Biden looked at the results and suggested no reset was necessary for his White House.

He spoke with certitude of the many factors grinding on Americans — the lingering pandemic, rising costs at the gas pump, uncertainty about the economy — as problems that would go away if he could just get his agenda passed.

“If I’m able to pass, sign into law my Build Back Better initiative, I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly,” the president said.

And,

“I’m not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out in the red districts who were Trump voters,” Biden said. “But maybe. Maybe.”

Voter surveys tell a different story. Three-quarters of voters said drawn-out negotiations in Washington over Biden’s governing agenda were an important factor in their vote. Those voters were more likely to back Youngkin, according to preliminary results from AP VoteCast, a survey of Virginia voters.

According to The Hill,

House Democrats said Wednesday they were switching tactics [but not strategy] and plowing ahead with a vote on President Biden’s sweeping social spending and climate package later this week, without getting a commitment from key Sen. Joe Mnchin (D-W.Va.) that he will support the legislation

. . . A Pelosi spokesman also confirmed that votes will be held this week and that the Speaker plans to bring Build Back Better to the floor first. But she has vowed to hold votes on Biden’s agenda in the past, only to run into opposition from her own party that forced her to delay the votes.

The difference this time seems to be that Pelosi is restoring paid family leave to the House version of the bill, something Manchin will not support in the Senate. This is presumably in the hope of getting the House progressives to support both the BBB and the BIF, with Sen Schumer left to clean up the discrepancy later. However, as I write this Thursday morning, I see no indication that the promised votes, already delayed from Tuesday, will occur by tomorrow, and next week the House is in recess. Pelosi's track record is not good here.

The bottom line appears to be that a 2022 defeat in the midterm elections has always been baked into the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, and from the start, their intent has been to run up the credit cards in anticipation of the end of the world, when they wouldn't see the payments falling due. The defeats on Tuesday simply confirmed the wisdom of this strategy in their view.

Interestingly, the Republicans are looking past the end of the world.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the campaign arm for House Republicans, announced an expansion to the list of Democrat House seats they hope to flip in the upcoming midterm elections, where the majority in the House of Representatives are on the line.

. . . In May, the NRCC expanded their list of offensive seats by ten seats, which brought their total to 57 vulnerable Democrats at the time. Since then, multiple Democrats have either decided to run for higher office or have announced retirement, ultimately leaving the House and ruining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) chances of keeping a Democrat majority in the House.

But the problem continues to be that the credit cards could be declined well before the world ends. A commentator who's been off the screen for some years, Mickey Kaus, suddently reemerges:

There’s a remote—but increasingly less remote— possibility that Dems will wind up with neither of their two big spending bills: 1) the bipartisan “BIF” hard infrastructure (bridges, roads, etc.) bill and 2) the partisan Dem social spending laundry list, aka “Build Back Better” (BBB).

. . . Still an unlikely scenario, as it’s always been almost inconceivable that the Democrats would screw things up so badly they’d end up passing nothing. But this achievement is now within reach, and if it happens, it looks like there will be an obvious fall guy: Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff.

I;ve been going at the current political situation from the standpoint of character issues, especially a serious lack of competence among the key players combined with the Dunning–Kruger effect, and I'm inclined to believe the outcome of achieving nothing is more liely than Kaus thinks.