ADVERTISEMENT

Opinion: The emptiness at the heart of Republicans’ midterm campaign

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
77,117
58,293
113
By James Downie
Digital opinions editor
Yesterday at 6:40 p.m. EDT
Listen to article
4 min


Republicans have finally found a coronavirus restriction they love: Title 42, the public health order implemented in March 2020 that allows the government to immediately expel noncitizens attempting to enter the United States instead of detaining them. Since the White House announced it was lifting the order starting in May, Republicans have piled on, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
“It’s an outrageous decision to eliminate Title 42,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” In the 12-minute interview, McConnell previewed the empty, misleading platform congressional Republicans will run on this year, but also provided Democrats evidence on how best to counter that platform.
Eliminating Title 42, McConnell told host Dana Perino, “will produce a gusher far beyond the open border we already have, produce a gusher of additional people coming in. Totally inconsistent, by the way, with them asking us for $10 billion for vaccines and therapeutics.” This is, to put it bluntly, bunk. Title 42 has likely inflated border crossing statistics by increasing the number of repeated attempts. The measure is being lifted not just because of pressure from progressives, but because the public health justification — if it ever existed — no longer applies. Once it’s lifted, those detained won’t be roaming the country; they will enter the U.S. immigration setup — a broken system that Republicans have shown no interest in fixing. And what’s really inconsistent is for Republicans to bewail numerous public health measures during the past two years as simply unconscionable burdens, only to reverse course for a measure that affects foreigners.
ADVERTISING
As for the broader GOP platform, McConnell said that it “will be focused on exactly what you and I have been talking about, crime, education, beefing up the defense of our country.” Right away, there are glaring absences: nothing about the economy, abortion, taxes or inflation (which McConnell criticized Biden for, without offering any solutions).
And what is there amounts to a much tamer version of the red meat Republican lawmakers are throwing to their base. The sum of McConnell’s dispute on defense is that “the president’s request for the Defense Department … doesn’t even keep up with inflation” — not exactly a yawning gap between the parties. Rather than continue the recent spectacle of accusing Democrats of sheltering sex offenders, McConnell just accused them of being “soft on crime.” And as for recent anti-trans bills and other attempts to police America’s classrooms, McConnell just mentioned “education” without elaborating.
But as empty and misleading as the McConnell platform is, it won’t be enough for Democrats to point that out to voters. Nobody won an election by running on fact checking. But another comment from McConnell provides a clue as to how the president and his party should position themselves in the coming months. “Biden ran as a moderate,” he told Perino. “If I’m the majority leader in the Senate, and Kevin McCarthy’s the speaker of the House, we’ll make sure Joe Biden is a moderate.”
That line should be a warning to those Democrats who’ve argued that Biden should play small ball in the run-up to the midterms. Their argument is that Biden won because voters wanted him to “lower the temperature” in Washington, as the president himself put it — and Democrats should double down on that ahead of the fall. But McConnell’s words illustrate the central problem with this idea: To the voters who care most about a “lower-temperature” politics, what argument appeals more than splitting control of Washington?
Press Enter to skip to end of carousel


Furthermore, McConnell’s comment underscores that, even as politics is less local and more national than ever, parties can still emphasize different messages to different parts of the electorate. McConnell can go on national television and pretend that Republicans just care about crime and defense, while less visible Republican lawmakers whip up the base with risible anti-women, anti-trans and anti-immigrant measures.
Democrats can adapt to that strategy for good rather than for ill. With nearly 50 years on the national stage, Biden’s reputation is essentially fixed as a reasonable moderate — there’s little that Democrats can do to buttress it, and little Republicans can do to dent it. The voters who are persuaded by that part of the Democratic argument have largely been won over already.
That leaves firing up the base as the best approach. Nothing accomplishes that task more than accomplishment after accomplishment. If those are bills and nominations passed by Congress — such as the infrastructure package and the elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court — that’s great. If moderate holdouts block that path, then executive actions — pushing humane border policies, lowering drug prices, canceling student debt and more — are the way to go. Either way, the active approach has the best chance of boosting Democratic voters’ enthusiasm and — just as importantly — helping Americans instead of hurting them.


 
They'd be idiots to not run on that issue. Why on earth do the Dems want to make the situation at the border even worse than it is now? All they have to do is nothing, to help the situation. But they just can't.

And LOL that this guy thinks cancelling student debt is a winner with anyone other than the far left...who are already going to pull straight lever Dem.
 
ADVERTISEMENT