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NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

**How the Democrats Go on the Offensive**

Voting against roads, bridges, kids, moms, grandmas, and grandpas should
come with a price.

The prospects of the Democrats holding the House and Senate after the
2022 elections are universally judged to be slim-and since last
week's elections, "slim" is putting it mildly.

But just how slim depends on the Democrats enacting the Build Back
Better bill, whose gestation period is already setting records, and
taking the Republicans to task for opposing its particulars and those of
the infrastructure bill that Congress enacted last week. It also depends
on a host of other factors-the state of the economy and the pandemic a
year from now, the Republicans nominating Larry Elder types in next
year's primaries, and so on-over which Democrats effectively have no
control. What the Democrats can control is their messaging on the
broadly popular particulars they'll have enacted if they pass both of
the Biden economic agenda bills-in particular, Republicans' lockstep
opposition to some particular particulars, like lowering drug prices,
making child care affordable, and filling potholes. The only other
election-related factor they can control is passing the voting rights
bill that would curtail Republicans' gerrymandering, voter suppression
laws, and legislation to enable legislatures to overturn election
results. That, of course, requires them to persuade the DINOmic
(that's Democrats in Name Only) duo of Manchin and Sinema to suspend
the filibuster when the voting rights bill is brought to the Senate
floor.

That, however, is not an issue of messaging, nor are we at all confident
that M&S can be persuaded that voting rights are more fundamental to
American democracy than the preservation of the filibuster. Attacking
Republicans for their opposition to reforms that are highly popular
across the political spectrum, however, is well within the Democrats'
capacity.

Maybe.

To date, both the White House and congressional Democrats have largely
proved incapable of highlighting just how their legislation meets
profound public needs. Republicans (and the DINO opponents of the BBB
bill) have focused almost solely on the legislation's price tag, while
Democrats have largely failed to disaggregate its
would-be-popular-if-anybody-knew-about-them particulars. With the single
exception of Bernie Sanders, whose emphasis on possible Medicare
expansions and drug price savings does seem to have broken through, no
Democrat has effectively pushed a particular provision into the public
consciousness. (Wholly apart from the substance of his politics-which
I completely support-Sanders is something of a genius at messaging.)

Once the Democrats enact the Build Back Better bill (which we have to
hope isn't winnowed to a bare husk), it will be easier for Democrats
to reach the Sanders standard, which should constitute half of their
messaging. The other half will be relentless attacking of Republicans
for opposing the bill's particulars. And, I suspect, it will be easier
to do this on the Build Back Better bill than it will on the
infrastructure bill, because some of the BBB's provisions will be up
and running in public view before the bridge and airport and even road
improvements that the infrastructure bill will enable. The days of the
New Deal's public-works projects-chiefly, the WPA-putting millions
of Americans to work within weeks are long gone. Most of those Americans
literally wielded picks and shovels; today's construction requires
more skills and longer preparation times than that of the 1930s.

Some parts of the Build Back Better bill will also take years to get
going. The establishment of universal pre-kindergarten for three- and
four-year-olds will take school districts some years to put in place.
Other parts of the bill, though-lowering the cap on what seniors must
pay for drugs to $2,000, the Child Tax Credit, and public provision to
make child care affordable-can be activated more quickly. They have to
be if the Democrats are to have an effective message in 2022 and, for
that matter, 2024.

Speaker Pelosi, whose credentials as a savvy pol are beyond dispute,
understands all this. She already has highlighted a message that House
Republicans tweeted out, opposing the infrastructure bill as socialism,
before they thought better of it:

Republicans will doubtless hammer home their culture-war polemics in
forthcoming elections-polemics that Democrats seldom manage to
successfully rebut. Right now, however, their failure to win the culture
wars seems to be the giant looming over all the election forecasts for
2022. Like John Paul Jones, however, they have "not yet begun to fight"
on their own turf-their support for, and Republicans' opposition to,
some very concrete necessities that they will have provided the
electorate. Right now, they're down, but the count is nowhere near
ten.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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What to Do When You Have 20 Million Gig Workers in the Coal Industry

Just transitions for India's coal communities will be painfully
difficult. BY REENA SHAH

Biden's Recovery Is on Track

And that's no reason to reduce Build Back Better, but every reason to
fully fund it. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Postal Banking Test in the Bronx Yields No Customers

From September 13 to October 31, not a single customer put a paycheck on
a gift card in one of the four test locations. BY DAVID DAYEN

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