Here Come the "Biden Should Have Got a Better Deal!" Takes
The all-purpose teardown argument for lazy cynics
Democrats announced their social spending package yesterday, and there’s something for everyone to not like. Some think the top-line number of $1.75 trillion over ten years is too small; Bernie Sanders initially proposed $6 trillion, then spent several months reminding everyone how far he came down from $6 trillion, which made me wonder why he didn’t start at $999 jillion so that he’d look really pragmatic. Others are disenchanted by Democrats’ “fund a program for a while and then hope for the best” strategy, which does have a real “have a baby and hope that fixes the marriage” vibe to it. Others dislike the bill from the opposite direction; Kyrstyn Synyma — whose name I can’t spell and I’m tired of looking it up, so from here forward she gets the Lynyrd Skynyrd “every vowel is a ‘y’” treatment — still might tank the whole thing.
Count me among the disappointed. Two of the opinions I mocked in the previous paragraph are opinions I hold; I wish the bill was much larger and I’d rather do a few things well than several things poorly. The bill is chock-full of stuff that isn’t quite what I wanted; the cumulative impact a bit of a letdown. It reminds me of a line some standup had in their act in the ‘90s: “You don’t go to Denny’s — you end up there.”
Well, here we are: Denny’s. You can have a highly-suspect $5 steak, or you can have a big hot plate o’ nothing. Your choice.
Of course, I’m being glib. For starters: This isn’t over, the bill can still change. Also, a positive framing makes things look very different. The bill would create universal pre-K, which has been on the Democratic wish list since the Clinton era. It would ensure that the poorest Americans have permanent access to some level of child tax credit. It has some nothing-to-sneeze-at environmental provisions. A grown-up understands that an imperfect thing is often better than nothing, and always keeps this bit of wisdom from Peep Show at the front of their mind:
To the extent that I’m disappointed, I know who to blame. First, I blame the founders, for creating an only-sorta-representational system with too many choke points. What a bunch of dumbasses. Second, I blame lobbyists, who are the Ex-Lax of the political process in that they promise to do something and then absolutely fucking deliver. Third, I blame Republicans, who get ignored in this discussion because everyone knows that their thoughts on taxes are identical to Frankenstein’s thoughts on fire, so there’s not much to talk about. And finally, of course, I blame the holdouts in the House, plus Joe Manchin and Krystyn Synyma, who have wielded a level of power throughout this process that would make Emperor Palpatine uncomfortable.
But some people will express their frustration by blasting Joe Biden. It’s happening already; Breaking Points’ Krystal Ball has been banging the Biden is fucking it all up drum, and Politico’s Eleanor Mueller reports that paid leave advocates are “fuming” over “an unwillingness by the White House to fight hard”. This talking point is inevitable; every time a deal is struck anywhere in the world, the “They should have got a better deal!” crowd comes out of the woodwork. Obviously, they sometimes have a point; Neville Chamberlain probably left a few chips on the table when he struck his Worst Catastrophe of the Modern Era deal with Hitler. But, much of the time, the complaint is Monday morning quarterbacking plus a veiled ad-hominem attack. We can disagree on how valid the critique in this instance, and I’ll give my two cents on Biden’s performance, but I’d like to reflect on how cheap and corrosive this talking point can be.
The “They should have got a better deal!” line had a busy last few years. In 2015, seemingly every world leader at the Paris Climate Summit returned home to claims that they got steamrolled by the other countries. In Colombia, an ex-president used the “it’s a bad deal!” narrative to get a plan to end Columbia’s decades-long civil war killed in a plebiscite despite overwhelming support in the regions where the war was fought. The runup to Brexit had several “better deal” moments; David Cameron was constantly heading across the Channel with promises to “get tough” with Europe — it was adorable the way he’d furrow his brow and act all cross in his little suit. It almost made me believe he was going to march in there and put Jean-Claude Juncker in a headlock until the UK was granted more expansive fishing rights.
The king of the “better deal” argument, of course, is Donald Trump. Being a Jack Donaghy-level negotiator was a key part of his pitch; Trump endlessly berated the “terrible deals” struck by his predecessors. I was always stunned by the traction Trump would get from denouncing, say, the Trans Pacific Partnership. As if anyone at his rally was thinking “It is crazy that we didn’t get better intellectual property protections from Brunei given the tariff reductions we’ve agreed to on sardine imports!”
Trump seems to understand negotiation about as well as I understood sex when I was five (I knew it was about butts…or something). To Trump, it’s all about toughness; he praised the harshness of Asian negotiators (with obvious racist undertones) and mocked the presumed weakness of Pete Buttigeig (with obvious homophobic undertones). But, what does “toughness” look like in practice? Put yourself in the room with Trump and Nancy Pelosi; if Trump demands something, and Pelosi says “no”, what’s Trump going to do? Punch her in the face? Spit poison at her like that dinosaur from Jurassic Park? Negotiating isn’t about scowling hard and pounding the table until the other person cries; it’s an expression of leverage. The idea that Trump would force capitulation from his overmatched negotiating partners was a dumb fantasy entertained by people who don’t know how the world works.
Of course, public, humiliating negotiating losses became a hallmark of Trump’s presidency. He badly lost the government shutdown battle with Democrats. He ended the Iran deal but didn’t replace it, extracting no concessions over ballistic missiles. Trump’s back-and-forth with Kim Jong-un produced nothing but a PR win for the latter dictator (BURN! I’m edgy!). Trump’s biggest “win” was the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is just NAFTA in a different font. It says a lot about the “better deal!” rhetoric that the person who used it most — the guy who pretended to have a negotiating magic feather that he would use to achieve amazing deals — ended up with a won/lost record that makes the Washington Generals look like the ‘96 Bulls.
But the idea that savviness and will can hack the political process isn’t just a Trumpist fantasy; it also exists on the left. Much of my short time answering phones in Rahm Emanuel’s congressional office was spent listening to constituents who were furious that Democrats wouldn’t “stand up”. Of course, the problem wasn’t that Democrats wouldn’t “stand up”; the problem was that it was 2005 and we were in the minority. I always wanted to respond to those calls by saying “Hey motherfucker — WE. DON’T. HAVE. THE. VOTES.” But even in Rahm Emanuel’s office, where swear words are not exactly an endangered species, you’re not allowed to start a sentence to a constituent with: “Hey motherfucker”.
If the “better deal” rhetoric was just Monday morning quarterbacking, that would be eye-roll-inducing but not much more. But I think it feeds cynicism. I think it reinforces a lazy “those clowns in Congress have done it again!” attitude that flattens everything and makes it impossible to separate good work from bad. If you believe that what you’re promoting is good, cheap cynicism is a problem, because it means that even when you succeed, some asshole can show up and say “yeah I woulda done it way better” without any basis.
Worse still, the narrative is often more than “they did a bad job”; it’s frequently “they sold us out!” The far left waited about ten minutes into Barack Obama’s presidency before declaring themselves “disappointed”, then spent eight years portraying Obama as the perpetrator of an elaborate bait-and-switch. A key part of this narrative was the idea that Obama didn’t mean what he said, and any expression of progressive values was just lip service in advance of inevitable capitulation. Every time Obama had to compromise — like when he nixed the Obamacare public option to placate Joe Lieberman, the Kyrstyn Synyma of his time — it provided more fodder for this narrative. “Why did Obama cave?” went the story. “If he really meant what he said, he would have stood strong and gotten a better deal!” Never mind that Joe Lieberman was a founding member of the John McCain Society For Being A Turd in the Punch Bowl for Inscrutable Reasons.
What’s my assessment of Joe Biden’s performance on this bill? I’m almost entirely agnostic. The negotiations are so opaque that I can’t pretend to know their precise contours. Now, I didn’t go to great lengths to track Biden’s every move, since he probably won’t call me at the end of this process and ask “Maurer, how’d I do?” People who followed the play-by-play more closely than I did might have informed opinions about his performance. And if a book comes out in two years that says “Biden spent most of the Build Back Better negotiations huffing glue and playing Ghost of Tsushima,” I’ll change my opinion. But I can’t really pretend to know what buttons he could have pushed to get a better outcome. I mean…how do you persuade Kyrstyn Synyma? I don’t know what she’s about; my best guess is that she’s either a Loki-esque god of mischief and fuckery or a really, really, really elaborate Andy Kaufman prank.
Maybe Biden did a great job. Or maybe he sucked; I know that I don’t know. But I also know that very few people do know. So, much of the whining we’re about to hear is from people who were waiting to launch the “we were sold out” narrative and decided that now’s a good time to start. The “better deal” talking point always works because it’s unfalsifiable; we can’t rewind negotiations and re-enact them a million times to determine the median outcome. It’s fair to be disappointed by the bill; I just compared it to a trip to Denny’s, so obviously I’m not exactly ready to lead a parade down Main Street. But there’s no evidence that Biden’s priorities were anything different from what he said they were. And no-one should compare our reality to an imagined world where deftness and guts can change the political process and produce a radically different outcome. A transformational, Great Society-type bill was never possible, because — to say something I should have said long ago — Motherfucker: We DO. NOT. HAVE. THE. VOTES.
Whether this bill is good, bad, or something in-between....who knows. But Biden and the Dems should go all out to get something done, especially considering David Shor's predictions for '22 and '24.
Remember when so called serious people were comparing Biden to FDR and LBJ? And he played into it? Can you imaging FDR's plans being held up by Krysten fucking Sinema? The idea is just laughable.
It's not lazy or cynical to takedown his performance when you set the stage like that. He is getting off incredibly easy.