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**SEPTEMBER 20, 2023**
On the Prospect website
* David Dayen on the Big Three automakers' labor shortages
* Will Raderman on how the Census Bureau undercounts poverty
* Andy Furillo on California's potent new climate disclosure bill
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Winning the Ideas, Losing the Politics
To win politically, everything will have to break right for Democrats,
and then some.
Progressives have won the battle of ideas. And reality has been a useful
ally.
No serious person any longer thinks that deregulation, privatization,
globalization, and tax-cutting serve economic growth or a defensible
distribution of income and wealth. "Free trade" has been revealed as a
corporate scheme to outsource production and undermine domestic
regulation of capitalism.
The neoliberal era that spanned three Democratic presidents deepened
economic concentration and created political feedback loops that
produced pressure for more neoliberalism. President Biden, surprisingly
and mercifully, broke with this self-annihilating consensus.
The
**Prospect** has gone from a prescient voice in the wilderness to an
influencer of actual policy. People from our tribe are serving in senior
posts in government.
Without a reliable majority in Congress, Biden worked miracles.
Inflation has been tamed, we are at full employment, supply chains are
being brought home, antitrust has been resurrected. Biden is taking on
Big Pharma and Big Tech and promoting strong unions.
Yet he is languishing in the polls. As I've written in previous
pieces, there are two big reasons. He looks too old for the job; and
more importantly, even Biden's accomplishments have not been nearly
radical enough to change entrenched patterns in the American economy
when it comes to jobs, paying for college, health care, and housing.
There is little prospect of altering that, absent Roosevelt-scale
majorities in Congress.
Beyond that problem, Republicans have become the party of nihilism.
There's an old saying: If you don't want to wash the dishes, break
the dishes. Republicans know they've lost public opinion on issue
after issue, so their alternative is to destroy democracy.
Then there is Trump. In his interview with NBC's Kristen Welker
, I expected sheer lunacy,
but he sounded to me like a surprisingly effective candidate. Put aside
the lying, and he's quick with a riposte, energetic and sly. He's
nimble in debate. If you do the state-by-state analysis, the 2024
election is likely to be alarmingly close.
There has been a running argument in the pundit class about whether
Biden should step aside. Do the following thought experiment: In an open
2024 primary, who among the likely alternatives to Biden would you
rather have? Not Newsom, not Buttigieg, not Harris, not Pritzker, not
Raimondo. The only one I'd rather have is Gretchen Whitmer, and there
is no guarantee that she'd be the nominee. Barring a health emergency,
Biden is who we have, for better or for worse.
As someone who has covered issues of political economy for half a
century, I plead guilty to insisting that pocketbook issues are
paramount in politics. It was the Democratic complicity in the economic
wreckage of the average American over four decades that finally brought
us Trump. There were compounding factors, but that was the essence.
There's a terrific piece in
**The Atlantic** by our friend Caroline Fredrickson, who was the
longtime head of the American Constitution Society. It's titled "What
I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism
."
She writes, "By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic
issues, liberals like me got defeated on both." And while Biden is
trying to reduce corporate power, she concludes, "that hasn't
generated much excitement from a liberal base that is still more focused
on social issues. Progressives, especially, must recognize that
preserving constitutional freedoms depends on winning the fight for
economic liberties. Treating them as separate goals will ultimately mean
losing out on both."
To win the politics, and begin the long journey of restoring both
democracy and the economic credibility of democracy, will require
everything to break right in 2024 and beyond, an immense turnout of a
progressive electorate that is too passive, no tactical blunders, and a
big dose of luck.
Just that.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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What Census Poverty Estimates May Miss
Pandemic unemployment programs are significantly underreported, giving a
misimpression about their effectiveness. BY
**WILL RADERMAN**
The Big Three's Labor Shortages
The only way the UAW's strategy of rejecting voluntary overtime can
work is if Ford, GM, and Stellantis lack enough workers to make cars.
BY DAVID DAYEN
California's Climate Disclosure Bill Could Have a Huge Impact Across
the Nation
If signed by Gov. Newsom, the legislation would set a precedent by
requiring large companies to disclose total greenhouse gas emissions. BY
ANDY FURILLO
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