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It's a BFD


President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act. I believe his former boss assesses the magnitude of the achievement best:
Let's just pause for a moment, shall we?

Pres. Biden has pushed through over $5 trillion of transformative spending with a bare majority in the House, and an evenly divided Senate, reliant on Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote, and on the good health of the entire Senate Democratic caucus. This is akin to holding together some object with chicken wire and spit. It shouldn't happen. And yet it's happened. 

Why is this? Well, Senator Joe Manchin says it best:
Manchin gave Biden credit for his role in the negotiations. “He knew enough, being a former senator, sometimes you just got to let us do what we got to do. I give him all the credit for that. You don’t do something of this magnitude with him not … having involvement and knowing what is going on.”
Maybe using the art of persuasion, rather than angrily wagging your finger and trashing the bill you were going to vote for anyway on the Senate floor is the way to go?

Ever since the Gingrich Revolution, we've been treated to a degradation in our politics. Newt Gingrich began the scorched earth policy of compromising on nothing, and demonizing the opposition as un-American traitors who, ideally, should be sent to at the very least re-education camps. And the Gingrich Revolution was made possible by the white flight from the Democrats to the Republicans in the wake of the civil rights and other social movements from the 1960s and 1970s to today.

In spite of all this, not only has Pres. Biden had the most consequential first two years of any president since Lyndon Johnson, but has done it with no margin of error. 

Now, of course, the elephant in the room is the midterm elections. According to political history, Democrats should suffer a shellacking. But that seems to not be in the offing. Democrats are poised to expand its Senate majority, and to hold onto its House majority. The GOP played a good hand badly. It was depending on inflation being the topic of conversation, where voters would trade liberty for lower gas prices. But Pres. Biden and Democrats have instead worked tirelessly to address the cost-of-living crisis. Gas prices are down, inflation is down. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade changed the political calculus overnight. Look at these figures:
Add to this the approval for the FBI's search and seizure at Donald Trump's rat-infested hotel:
All of these are numbers which should bring a fear of pale death upon the GOP. It thought it could ride inflation and culture wars to power. Instead, the economy is booming, and it's on the wrong side of those culture wars.

Of course, we don't have this in the bag yet. But I'd rather be a Democrat than a Republican right now.

As the tzaddik Dan Rather would say on his newscast: Courage.
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