Progressives believe that they are not to blame for President Biden’s low approval ratings, claiming that insufficient devotion to the leftist agenda is the cause of all problems that the White House now faces, The Hill reported on Friday.
According to Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, most of Biden’s electorate criticize him for his indecisive approach towards voting rights, healthcare, arms control and climate change.
“Biden’s popularity was high when he ran on a progressive agenda — and it dropped when he let corporate Democrats take the reins,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a surprise that voters are becoming impatient.”
Biden was hit with poor approval ratings earlier this month, when Republican senators last Wednesday blocked a Democrat attempt to pass a voting reform bill after two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refused to vote against the filibuster that would have allowed Democrats to pass the legislation by simple majority.
The Republican resistance and the two Democrats have also ruined Biden’s plans to pass the Build Back Better package that includes a wide range of spending on social welfare and the fight against climate change.
Liberals claim that Biden is partly acting in the interest of the Republican Party, as he is not fully on board with the progressive agenda. According to them, the previous Infrastructure bill is “a lost opportunity that cut into their leverage for pressuring Manchin and Sinema on the Build Back Better legislation.”
“They’re standing in the way of the president’s promises, and it will be mostly their fault if Democrats lose Congress in November,” Prakash said of moderate Democrats.
Meanwhile, moderate Democrats have criticized White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who was said to show favour to some progressives, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, according to some reports.
Democratic operative Eddie Vale noted that progressives shouldn’t be blamed for Biden’s performance as president, as they “are the ones who ultimately compromised and backed him” when he called on them to vote for the infrastructure spending, despite the fact that they wanted to link this bill with the adoption of the Build Back Plan.
“For the specific argument folks are currently having and the spate of stories going after Jayapal and Klain, blaming progressives doesn’t really make any sense because in the end they went along with the ‘pass infrastructure only’ strategy and almost all voted for both bills,” said Democratic operative Eddie Vale.
According to Camille Rivera, a partner at the progressive firm New Deal Strategies, “People are just really exhausted by moderate Democrats continuously eating their young.” She claimed that “conservative and moderate Democrats need to start taking responsibility for their own messaging.”
Assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College Adam Hilton also said that liberals “are not to blame.”
“On the contrary, the progressive wing broadly speaking is very much responsible for defining this ambitious agenda,” he said. “Biden is a centrist in a party that is tapping left. To remain a centrist, he’s got to be actually moving.”
Operatives like Rivera were said to now be moving into campaign mode, “anticipating a tough midterm cycle” while many expect that Republicans are likely to regain an advantage in Congress after the midterm elections. Most of them connect the general dissatisfaction with Biden’s policies with the unprecedented inflation rates and the government’s response to the pandemic, which has spiked again with the emergence of the new Omicron variant.