I don’t blame Sens. Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema for the failure to secure passage of the Build Back Better Act. I blame President Biden. The Democrats, in their primaries, had the choice between a moderate in Joe Biden and a progressive ideology offered by Bernie Sanders. They overwhelmingly choose moderation, in Biden.

I voted for President Biden in 2020. I believed that he was a long-needed voice of political moderation compared to the tumultuous Donald Trump. Now I look at the Democratic agenda and see only the Sanders ideology being put forward.

President Biden, having had a long career in the Senate, must have realized that bundling all the different priorities – climate change, child tax credit expansion and health care legislation (to name a few) – in one bill would be a heavy lift. The Senate is as evenly divided as it can be. Each one of these priorities could have been brought up as a separate bill. Yes, it would have taken longer and all of the individual pieces may not have passed. The passage of the physical infrastructure portion of Build Back Better, however, shows it is possible to get a targeted bill passed with bipartisan support.

The Democratic Party’s progressive wing needs to recognize political reality. The party did not win a historic landslide in the 2020 election. There was no mandate for a major shift in the country’s political philosophy.

Democracy is the politics of the half-loaf. Rarely does either party get everything that they want. Better a half-loaf than none.

Samuel Rosenthal
Portland

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