This is blame game stuff and Blake's the kind of reporter conservative Democrats would run to, but taking it seriously, what could it possibly mean that Biden is "too far to the left?"Some in Biden-land are already asking themselves if the president has allowed himself to be tugged too far to the left while in office, and those voices are likely to get louder now.
— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) November 3, 2021
In general if you ask how much more "centrist" could the party be, the answer is "none more centrist." How much more "centrist" in governance could national politics be? None. It's why the centrist policy agenda is empty, except for things that are so corrupt they can't be disguised and things which are clearly unpopular.
Republicans found ways to run against Obamacare, though even then I think a year of the Dems looking like idiots trying to pass it was really the issue. Most people didn't want to hear about BENDING THE COST CURVE.
They found no ways to run against the Biden FAR LEFT agenda because the FAR LEFT parts of it are the most popular things. They just haven't done it at all.
Manchin has done their work of running against it, but he's just been gumming up the works and making the Dems look incompetent for months.
Give them their centrist president (Biden)*, their centrist candidate (McAuliffe), and they still can't fail, they can only be failed.
The "center right" won for decades. They basically have nothing left to offer. "Elect us and nothing will change, except we'll probably keep doing corrupt stuff" is all they have. As I've said, the story of every Dem election win is they promise lefty stuff, fail to deliver, then they lose subsequent elections and then tell themselves that doing all the lefty stuff they didn't do was the cause. They lose power, eventually go back to running on lefty stuff, win, and then again fail to deliver.
No I don't think all "lefty" stuff is popular. But some is! This is not the story that is told in the Morning Joseph Reality Zone, where Dems are never conservative enough, but it's what happens.
*I think dictator Biden (whatever the problems of actual president Biden in implementing the agenda) would be better than I thought! But he was the safe centrist guy.It was not Pramila Jayapal who held a petulant press conference yesterday threatening to tank the entire agenda after weeks of sitting back and being given 90% of the changes she wants in the bill. It was Joe Manchin who did that.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 3, 2021