Will Biden And The Dems Finally Get It? Your Thoughts.

Readers dissent over my frustration with the ruling party and my willingness to vote GOP in the midterms.

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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The first dissenter over my latest column replies with a “Yikes!”:

You list a litany of ways that the Biden administration “threw [...] away” the chance to tack to the center. But a solid half of the examples you cite are cases of cultural change that overlap with government only at the hyperlocal level (e.g. school boards and town councils), and they certainly aren’t decided in the halls of Congress.

As to your other examples of leftward drift, it’s hard to tell what you really want. In nearly the same breath you criticize “the biggest expansion in government since LBJ” and then blame Biden for failing to make the extended Child Tax Credit permanent. Which is it?

It’s hard to escape the sense that you’re voting out of a generalized frustration over broader cultural change, rather than any honest balancing of what the two parties have actually done and would do. That’s a reactionary mindset, and it’ll be small consolation to say “I told you so” when Republicans push us to the brink of another debt ceiling default and tee up a national abortion ban and mandatory concealed carry permitting for 2025.

I’m sorry but I’ve now re-read the piece a couple of times and can find no reference to the CTC. Cultural issues are indeed often resolved at the local level and should be. But Biden’s positions are the left-most possible: fast-track sex changes for minors, little to no due process in sexual harassment hearings, equity hiring across government, critical race theory as far as the eye can see.

Another Biden defender:

You wrote, “What is there for centrists?” How about Biden’s record on gun control legislation, the semiconductors bill, the PACT Act for veterans exposed to burn pits and Agent Orange, and the infrastructure bill? And Biden did it with a 50-50 Senate!

You say that infrastructure “was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state.” Please tell me the date and vote count on the passage of that lefty bill that expanded the welfare state. I don’t remember that passing. I do remember Manchin’s IRA passing, which will lower prescription drug costs and invest in fighting climate change. Is Manchin now part of the Squad? And when you talk about the first spending bill Biden passed, remember we were still in a pandemic with high unemployment, so hindsight is a little 20-20 on that one. 

I get that you got a bug up your ass about sex changes, but the idea that Biden is governing as some far-lefty is silly. 

Another also believes I am “mistaken about Biden on many points in the culture wars”: