Dems don’t have the votes
That canny Cajun James Carville had this to say in April: “The Democratic Party can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s the fact. We don’t have the votes.”
And you know what? That’s still the fact.
It’s still true, however hard the Democratic left tries to demonize the West Virginia senator as an iconoclastic fool or a sycophantic toady to the interests of big business.
The Democratic strategist’s incontrovertible truth is tough medicine for the party’s aggressive progressive wing, a group of idealistic social engineers.
Manchin, of course, has a fellow moderate holdout in Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Over the weekend, all kinds of crude attempts were made to attack Sinema and paint her as a certified eccentric, if not someone who has entirely taken leave of her senses. On Sunday, protesters even confronted her in a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she occasionally teaches. In a bathroom. Not so classy.
The hubristic left of the party feels the wind of power at its back and yet also fears its changing direction. They worry that Republicans may make midterm gains that will torpedo their current plans. Thus they want to pass their agenda now, while they can.
Despite all the failings of Donald Trump, the kind of inept, narcissistic, scorched-Earth opponent who should have been toast, Democrats did not enjoy a sweeping rise to power in the last election. In fact, they barely squeaked by in the Senate, winning only because Georgia election rules mandated a runoff. They were not expected to gain both of those seats after the first go-round, and they probably only did so because the spurned Trump started to enact his signature mischief, casting evidence-free doubt on electoral fairness and basically telling his people to stay home rather than enable a corrupt system.
That made it possible for the unlikely win. But even then, the Democrats could only manage to gain power in the Senate based on the tie-breaking vote of the vice president.
There is no appetite for a socialist America with the state running a big percentage of the economy and big earners getting to keep little of the fruits of their labors, and thus laboring proportionately less.
If there was, the results of the last election would have been different and Democrats would not have chosen a candidate who at least positioned himself as a centrist and a moderate, even if some of those closest to him at the White House seem not always to remember their history.
America may need to send another memo.