This week, Democrats suffered devastating losses in solidly blue states that Biden won by sizable margins. In Virginia, Democrats lost all three statewide offices in Virginia, the state Senate president in New Jersey is currently trailing, and several democratic candidates were blown out in local Long Island races.
As a result, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing and blame gamesmanship among Democrats. However, as noted by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, “no one offered a more cutting — and honest — assessment of exactly what happened than Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger,” who argues that Biden misunderstood his mandate.
“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” Spanberger told The New York Times, alluding to the sweeping agenda the president is seeking to enact with the thinnest of legislative majorities.
There’s absolutely no question that since coming into office, Biden has pursued an ambitious agenda “in the sense that his proposed spending would represent a major reentry of the federal government into the lives of the average American,” writes Cillizza before pointing out:
“Congress passed — and Biden signed into law — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
The Senate passed — and the House is debating — a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal that would fund much-needed repairs and updates on roads and bridges (and the like).
Senate and House Democrats are considering a social safety net bill with an estimated price tag of $1.75 billion.
Total it up and you get almost $5 trillion in additional government spending in the first year of Biden’s first term, to be disbursed over a decade.
That’s a stunning reversal from the mid-1990s when Bill Clinton premised his 1996 reelection campaign on the idea that “the era of big government is over.”
The Biden view of the 2020 election was that the country was at a crisis moment — created by the twin cataclysms of Donald Trump’s presidency and a once-in-a-century pandemic — and that he was elected to lead it through to the other side.
But, judging from the disastrous results at the ballot box on Tuesday, Biden might do better to go smaller rather than bigger on his proposals over the next year.
