Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Joe Biden in the Rose Garden at the White House on May 25, 2023
In the endgame of debt talks, one strategic school of thought holds that Biden needs to look presidential in keeping America from defaulting, even to the point of sacrificing some of his own program. The other holds that Biden’s program is a superb achievement that needs to be defended and built upon; and that Biden’s differences with Republicans, whose own programs are extreme and unpopular, must not be blurred.
Biden is now trying to have it both ways. As my colleague David Dayen has reported, he is perilously close to a deal that would sacrifice domestic spending, giving House Speaker Kevin McCarthy bragging rights and splitting Biden’s own party. Recent leaks show a deal keeping nondefense spending relatively flat for the next two years—though with inflation that’s a real cut. The military budget would go up.
Here is where the insidious role of centrist Democrats comes in. Third Way types going back to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are to blame for making budget discipline a holy grail that now contours the Biden-McCarthy negotiations. Many are crowing about Biden’s accomplishments while adding to the pressure on Biden to wreck them.
An interesting case in point is Simon Rosenberg, long a leading DLC figure who is now a major supporter of the very Biden programs that would have appalled the Democratic Leadership Council. Rosenberg worked in the Clinton White House, then founded the New Democrat Network in 1996 with Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Breaux to raise corporate money for Democrats.
But with the New Democrat brand fatally tarnished, Rosenberg recently folded the organization and repositioned himself. Long a behind-the-scenes operative, he became famous in 2022 as one of the few pundits who challenged the conventional wisdom and predicted that the midterm would not be the widely forecast blowout. He was attacked in Politico, and when he turned out to be right about 2022, major commentators treated Rosenberg as seer.
(As a point of personal pride, I should add that I also challenged the conventional assumptions about 2022, both in a book, Going Big, and in several Prospect pieces that predicted an even House and a Democratic Senate. But I was not astute enough to get myself attacked in Politico.)
Rosenberg took advantage of his new acclaim to rebrand himself as an extreme optimist about Democratic chances to win big in 2024. Earlier this year, he created a Substack newsletter named with the unfortunate pun “Hopium Chronicles.” (Get it? Is he high on his own supply? What about those deaths of despair?)
Rosenberg has called for massive investment in organizing, especially of the young, and has helped activists raise money for it (which is all to the good), and has criticized Democratic messaging. But the messaging he proposes would be disastrous.
He argues that Democrats should be bragging about how great the economy is. Unfortunately, that’s not what most working-class people and most young people experience.
Gallup, polling in early 2023, found that 80 percent of people surveyed expect the economy to worsen this year. A November 2022 survey by pollster Stan Greenberg for Democracy Corps found that young people aged 18 to 29 feel negatively about the economy by a margin of 38 percent. This is hardly surprising, as I pointed out in a recent post, because most young people are having great difficulty getting traction in their own lives.
Political consultant Mike Lux told me, “Our message needs to be: We know that times are still tough and that things still cost too much, but we’ve gotten a lot done and are working to solve your problems—elect more Democrats and we will help working families even more.”
To the extent that onetime New Democrats are embracing Biden’s progressive program, that’s a good sign of which way the wind is blowing. That doesn’t mean their advice should be heeded, either on budget discipline or on messaging.
Michael Kinsley famously observed that conservatives welcome converts while liberals abhor heretics. By all means, let’s welcome belated converts to the progressive cause—and be appropriately wary of what they are selling.
