• Ugly Whore Rashida Tlaib's State of the Union Response to Biden Is a Gi

    From Kamala "Suck'em Off" Harris@21:1/5 to All on Thu Mar 3 02:08:20 2022
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    On the night of President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union
    address, in which the president called for unity against both
    foreign and domestic threats, why would a fellow Democrat feel
    compelled to deliver a progressive response?

    Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib spoke on behalf of not the Democratic
    Party but the Working Families Party, in her post-SOTU comments. She
    was careful not to call it a rebuttal, but whatever you call it it’s
    a slap at her party’s leader at a time when he is facing multiple
    crises and the Democrats have the slimmest of margins in the House
    and Senate.

    Her remarks reprised the year-long arguments within the Democratic
    Party over the aspirations of the progressive agenda versus the
    inability to marshal the votes in the Senate. The congresswoman, a
    member of the leftist activist group in the House dubbed “the
    Squad,” didn’t name names— but she didn’t have to. Everyone knows
    who she means when she talks about “obstructionist Democrats” and “corporate-backed Democrats.”

    Crisis and Opportunity Could Lead to a Biden Bounce Very Soon

    Rep. Tlaib called on Biden to use his executive powers “now” to
    cancel student loan debt and regulate carbon emissions and fix labor
    rules. She rattled off a wish list that echoed a lot of what Biden
    had just called for in a Congress where chance of passage is zero,
    but where hope must be kept alive.

    “I am a lifelong Democrat, and I am also part of the Working
    Families Party,” the congresswoman said. “In the richest country in
    the world, it shouldn’t be this hard for so many to have a good
    life.” The Working Families Party is a voice for the multi-racial
    working class, and if they were in power, “we’d fight to get a
    minimum wage of at least $15 an hour,” Tlaib added.

    At a time when polls show voters think Biden is already too far
    left, Tlaib’s grabbing a State of the Union platform struck others
    in the party as self-destructive in the extreme. “Why does any
    Democrat at this moment think it’s a good idea to attack other
    Democrats on the night of the President’s State of the Union, it’s insane,” says Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate
    Democratic group.

    After Tlaib stepped forward to claim time, Texas Rep. Colin Allred
    said he would deliver a response for the Black Caucus, and the co-
    chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus also put in their bid to assess
    the evening, but it was Tlaib’s response that exposed old wounds and
    rankled Democrats.

    She spoke at the invitation of the Working Families Party, which
    promotes progressives and has become a player in New York state
    politics. It recently saw a silver lining in potential Democratic
    losses in the upcoming midterms, extolling the resulting “smaller
    but more progressive Democratic caucus.”

    “No Democrat should be allowed to actively cheer for Republican
    majorities and not be called on it,” says Bennett. With a three-vote
    margin in the House, caucus purity means handing power to a
    Republican Party enthralled by the cult of Trump.

    Democrats are looking at a potential blowout in November if they
    can’t reverse voters’ negative impressions of what they’ve
    accomplished since gaining control of the White House and both
    chambers of Congress. Progressives are nursing a grudge over the
    Build Back Better bill. They supported a bipartisan infrastructure
    bill on the assurance that legislation would follow to address the
    climate crisis and boost the social safety net.

    That didn’t happen, and they blame moderate Democratic senators Joe
    Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—as well as other centrists they call
    “corporate Democrats”—for supposedly misleading them.

    “They have the mistaken theory that standing up to Joe Biden is
    going to help them get what they want,” says Elaine Kamarck of the
    Brookings Institution. “All it does is alienate all the Democrats
    they need to make friends of. It’s a wing of the party that wants to
    act out their fantasy.”

    For Kamarck and her longtime colleague William Galston, this is Back
    to the Future. Thirty-three years ago, the duo issued a
    groundbreaking study on “The Politics of Evasion” that forced
    Democrats to confront a two-decade spell where they won just won
    presidential election (Jimmy Carter, in 1976). Their analysis helped
    set the stage for Bill Clinton to find a governing agenda that could
    win nationally.


    In Wisconsin, one of nine swing states they examined, 56 percent of
    the electorate is white and non-college, 30 percent is white and college-educated, 6 percent is Black, and 4 percent Hispanic. In
    2020, the economic and social crisis created by COVID-19 brought
    enough of the white non-college voters back into the Democratic fold
    in key swing states. “But these successes must not blind Democrats
    to the fact that these voters often have found Republicans’ cultural
    claims more persuasive than the Democrats’ economic arguments,” they
    write.

    Democrats Can Salvage Biden’s Presidency With These Three Simple
    Moves

    They cite surveys that find only 7 percent of the electorate
    consider themselves “very liberal,” and only 9 percent identified
    with the policies associated with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep.
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

    “How the hell can they get anything accomplished for the people they
    serve with 9 percent? They live in a deep, deep blue bubble, and it
    causes them to do things that achieve the opposite result of what
    they want,” Kamarck told The Daily Beast. (For example, Majority
    Whip Jim Clyburn said Democrats lost a dozen seats because of
    “Defund the Police.”)

    “It makes me mad, as you can see,” Kamarck continued. “The problem
    is we’re known by our extremes. If [Tlaib] wants to run on the
    Working Families ticket, fine, but she ran as a Democrat.”

    In the piece they wrote 33 years ago, the cost of ducking the hard
    truths was getting a George H.W. Bush or a Bob Dole, says Kamarck.
    “Now the threat is getting a Donald Trump and the end of democracy.”

    For her part, Tlaib didn’t come to Congress to be a team player. She
    was one of six Democrats—all members of the Squad—who voted last
    year against the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The only
    Palestinian-American in Congress, she has made comments about Israel
    that have not landed well with her colleagues.

    Tlaib’s words Tuesday night were not nearly as inflammatory as was
    her display of disunity to a president beleaguered in part because
    he stood up for progressive legislation she supported but that he
    couldn’t deliver, at least not yet.

    https://news.yahoo.com/rashida-tlaib-state-union-response-
    045645554.html

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