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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.”

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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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