Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Biden leads a bipartisan group of senators from the White House, June 24, 2021, after a meeting on the national infrastructure plan.
For almost a year now, Democrats have enjoyed almost unprecedented unity. Phase one was the unity necessary to oust Trump and elect Biden. Phase two is the delicate dance needed to get big public-investment bills through Congress, recognizing that politics is the art of the possible—all the more so when your working majority is about zero.
I don’t know about you, but for me the recent burst of Democratic unity has been a miracle seldom seen. I’ve lived through Dixiecrats undermining civil rights, the anti-war movement toppling LBJ, the hard hats versus hippies electing and re-electing Nixon, the DLC trashing “interest group liberalism” (as if the ultimate interest group were not Wall Street), the splits over NAFTA, and of course Bernie versus Hillary.
Biden, by seeming reassuringly moderate in his bearing and rhetoric, while surprisingly progressive on the substance, has managed to hold his party together on behalf of genuine progress.
But was it just too sweet to last? Are we back to the Democrats’ usual default setting—the famous circular firing squad? Last week, it sure seemed so.
Thanks to a Biden blurt—that he would never sign a compromise jobs and infrastructure bill without a commitment to pass a bigger bill as part of budget reconciliation, a very carefully choreographed two-step maneuver almost collapsed.
Now, the deal seems back on track, but both progressives dismayed by the compromise and more moderate Democrats pursuing an illusory bipartisanship are quietly seething and threatening to blow the whole thing up.
Get a grip, people. This is how it’s going to be for a while.
If Biden can just avoid more unfortunate blurts, we’ll get most of the public investment we need. It sure beats having Trump and McConnell run the government.
