JOHN PODHORETZ: Build Back Better’s freeze puts the bow on Biden’s very bad year.
The last time Washington gave off these particular vibes — an out-of-control economy with top-down policy solutions that only made things worse and a depressed and withdrawn foreign policy that only emboldened our adversaries — I had a full Jewfro atop my head and was watching “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” at home on Saturday nights because I couldn’t get a date to go to the disco with me.
I’m getting old, is what I’m saying, and “West Side Story” isn’t the only convincing remake I’ve seen. All this hearkens directly back to 1979-1981, the late Carter years and the peculiar emotional combination of confusion, powerlessness and rage that seemed to emanate from the liberal ruling class when its off-the-shelf answers to pressing questions just didn’t assure anyone that they knew what they were doing.
Biden’s championing of a bill initially designed to spend $6 trillion ate up his party’s legislative attention for nearly six months. Build Back Better declined in size but never ascended in approval, no matter the propagandistic efforts to claim its provisions were popular — just so long as nobody was asked how much the provisions they liked would actually cost.
It doesn’t really matter why Biden went down this stupid path. It doesn’t matter whether he had an idea about solidifying his party’s progressive base in the way Donald Trump solidified his party’s conservative base. Or maybe it was because third-rate newsmagazine historians and bestselling pop biography toadies came to the White House sucking their “PBS NewsHour” thumbs and swelling his head with comparisons to FDR and LBJ and whatever other three-initialed liberal gods they might have invoked to cloud what little reason Biden might have left.
However, Build Back Better’s freeze is a bit of battlefield prep for the midterms:
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