The best political advice for both President Joe Biden and for the Democratic Party as a whole came, oddly enough, from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the veteran Kentucky lawmaker offered plenty of criticism for Biden, very much on target, but the implicit advice was perhaps more important — both for Biden and the country.
McConnell perhaps didn’t mean it as advice but as tough talk. Asked by host Dana Perino what Republicans will do if they retake congressional majorities, the Republican leader ticked off a host of issue priorities and then said, “Let me put it this way. Biden ran as a moderate. We’ll make sure Joe Biden [actually governs as] a moderate.”
McConnell has an excellent point. Biden ran in 2019 and 2020 as the nonradical Democrat, in contrast to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Almost as soon as he nailed down the nomination, though, he adopted a policy agenda literally written by Sanders’s supporters. And he has governed as a radical big spender, a radical opponent of domestic energy production, a radical proponent of open borders, a supporter of radical theories and practices on race and sexuality, and a radical canceler of the debts of wealthy students. As McConnell said, Biden also has submitted a defense budget that would not even keep up with inflation, even as threats grow from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
Here, though, is where it’s not just Biden who should pay heed to the need to govern as a moderate. Biden is the fourth straight Democratic president to spend his first two years trying to govern not from the center but from significantly on the political Left. Two of them at least partly learned their lessons, and, after moving away from the Left, made political recoveries. Let’s review the first three, in reverse chronological order.
Biden had a front-row seat when serving as vice president to Barack Obama, who used all sorts of procedural legerdemain to force through a massive (and counterproductive) revolution in healthcare policy known as Obamacare. He also pushed massive spending and a heavy, bureaucratic re-regulation of the economy. Democrats in turn got pounded in the first Obama-Biden midterm elections. In fact, it was only after Obama assigned Biden to negotiate a major spending restriction plan with Republican then-Speaker John Boehner that Democratic political fortunes recovered.
Likewise, President Bill Clinton began his term from the far-liberal side in 1993-94, trying to force through the extraordinarily complicated “Hillarycare” health plan while pushing tax hikes and cutting the military. Result: Republicans took a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years, ushering in the “Gingrich revolution.” Only when Clinton began what he called “triangulating” between the conservative Republicans and the liberal congressional Democrats did he recover politically.
Then there was Jimmy Carter, who didn’t begin far-left on all issues but did so on the two most important policy areas. Carter tried to ration energy rather than boost production of it, and he tried to appease the Soviet Union rather than compete with it. Even after Republicans made major midterm election gains, Carter continued in these directions until the twin challenges of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — after the latter of which, he said pathetically that he had learned more about the Soviets’ true nature in the previous few days than he had in his entire previous life.
The reality is that when Democrats govern from the Left, they and the country suffer. When they try to govern near the center, the nation moves forward without disaster.
