re: #247 Targetpractice

“Perfect” would be telling Manchin and Sinema to eat shit, then reviving the $10T bill that Senate Dem progressives wanted in the first place. Hell, even $6T would be considered “perfect” at this point. Saying that $3.5T is “perfect” and that the party’s progressive majority is wrong for holding up the “good” infrastructure bill is the sort of shit that got us the 2010 wave election. You can’t keep shoveling shit on the plates of the party’s base and telling them that it’s either eat what’s on the plate or go hungry.

And the point being if that was even remotely possible, that’s what Dems might be trying to aim for. But we are constrained by the numbers we have. And the coverage and the reactions on the ground absolutely do NOT reflect that, pretending that our current margins count as ‘total control’, and that any compromise, at the start or further down the line, is a betrayal and proof the Dems don’t actually want to do anything. I already heard enough about how the 3.5T wasn’t enough at the start and how it was proof that the Dems couldn’t be trusted, and it simply snowballed, despite the fact that the hangup was 2 holdout Dems, and an entire opposition party standing lockstep athwart things.

It’s the whole Green Lantern theory where people think Dems can do anything if they willed it enough, and the fact that they don’t proves that they’re fakes and worse than the GOP. They want Biden to be the Trump of the left, casting EOs like they were Halloween candy and essentially running roughshod over rule of law, but just for the other aisle, when that’s wholly unsustainable and unrealistic, especially for what damage that can and would do to the party and its chances going forward.

And as pointed out, the reaction is never to push to vote more and increase the margins that Dems can work with, but to withhold their vote to ‘teach the Dems a lesson’ or just outright wish for the total implosion of the party so something ‘better’ can take its place. The fact that we’re not getting ‘perfect’ is proof enough for so many that the Dems are the real problem and that we should be rallying to treat Biden as the worst president ever and Dems to fail and go away.

Meanwhile, the GOP gets to be treated as the default for Governance and win just by showing up, and they’ve parlayed it into nigh-infinite power on the state and local levels because the standards for Dems are ‘perfect’ or ‘absolute failure’.