Biden’s Shelf Life In Connecticut

Lamont, Biden and Hayes

No one knows exactly why postmodern progressives have been cool on President Joe Biden, who has been performing consistently as a rusting, antique, radical, since he first stepped into the White House. Some progressives argue that Biden, Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, and US Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer of reliably left wing New York, all  talk a good game but are slow to deliver on transformative policies.

Time, sadly, has passed them by.

Just now in the Democrat Party, Biden’s opposite number is not Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders but rather Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat in the fashion of President John F. Kennedy, the King Arthur of Camelot.

No one of importance in the Democrat Party yet has recommended that Manchin run for president in 2024, although there is much dissatisfaction with progressive/socialist doctrine among moderate to liberal Democrats. The average Democrat voter is unlikely to focus on ideological perplexities, but there is a growing body of evidence that all is not well in party ranks.

Dispiriting polls show that important parts of the Democrat Party nexus – bitten, as is most of the country, by inflation, which has raised the cost of goods and services while at the same time devaluing the purchasing power of the dollar – are wandering from the fold, the enchantment of long held habits having been broken by rude realities.

A nearly five trillion dollar spending line would have shocked the political conscience of a President John Kennedy or, closer to home here in Connecticut, a Governor Ella Grasso, but the current crop of Connecticut Democrat shakers and movers appear comfortable with monstrous and inflationary spending totals.

Connecticut state debt exceeds its Gross Domestic Product, a reliable inflation marker, and yet the brows of Governor Ned Lamont and his factotums in Connecticut’s General Assembly, Senate President Martin Looney and Speaker of the State House Matt Ritter are unmarred with worry lines.

Not so with people who buy gas, clothing, food and other necessities with devalued dollars.

We know that both improvident spending and over regulation are contributory causes of inflation, and yet Democrat economic policy, national and state, would seem to suggest that both are curative measures.

Some sort of a tipping point is within view, according to polls that show Biden scraping the bottom of the approval/disapproval barrel. Nearly every poll suggests that economic and cultural dislocations may have convinced some stalwart Democrat voters, many unaffiliated voters, and traditional supporters of Democrat politics uneasy with political strong-arm tactics, that a turnabout in policies would improve Democrat opportunities in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Asked in a mid-June political survey by Yahoo News -- “Would you say things in this country today are generally headed in the right direction?” -- only 21 percent of respondents answered “Yes.” Naysayers were 67 percent. Those “not sure” represented a slender 11 percent of respondents.

Political deflations of this magnitude very late in mid-term campaigns are at least as difficult to overcome as inflation. In recent days, Yahoo News reports, “a series of stories questioning whether Biden will run for reelection in 2024 — and quoting concerned Democratic sources — have surfaced in the press. The concern isn’t limited to party officials. Just 21% of Americans — down from 25% three weeks ago, and the lowest number to date — say Biden should run again. But perhaps more strikingly, a greater share of 2020 Biden voters now say he shouldn’t run again (40%) than say he should (37%). Last month, those numbers were reversed.” Neither Yahoo News nor the New York Times are part of what progressives view as the pro-Trump media network.

Republicans in Connecticut likely believe that this almost universal dissatisfaction might well trickle down, come November 2022, to a sizable number of voters. And one pro-Trumpian waitress at a local diner has told me she believes Biden’s reelection prospect provides state Republicans with their best opportunity in years to recapture some political power positions if – big “if”-- they conduct the kind of political campaigns that quell fears and advance alternative Republican policies.  

Most of the people she knows are more dissatisfied with their present circumstances that they are satisfied with the usual state Democrat Party payouts, many of which, unlike their spending and tax schemes, are temporary.

Many Democrats in Connecticut have learned not a thing from recent history. And, to vary a well-worn phrase, politicians who learn nothing from history are doomed not to repeat their terms in office – assuming the democracy we have heard so much about during the administration of Trump The Terrible, is still in good repair.