Distant Early Warning

The New York Times has reported that the Biden White House received warnings from pollsters as far back as five or six months ago that concerns over inflation, immigration and crime needed to be dealt with, but the Biden administration chose to concentrate on its Build Back Better initiative.  But as long as that well-known West Virginia Republican, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, was not going to support Build Back Better, President Biden's poll numbers were only going to go from bad to worse.

Now it's May, the midterms are only six months or so away, an the President is trying to play catch-up with issues the voters care about rather than try to push child care, the environment, or prescription drug prices, which, if you believe the Republican Party, voters couldn't care less about.  It may already be too late for that. Antipathy toward the Biden administration appears to be set like concrete, and the Republicans are so heavily favored to win the midterms that the actual election may just be a formality (provided any Democratic voters are actually allowed to cast ballots).    

I'm pretty much resigned to seeing a Republican congressional takeover in 2022 and possibly a Republican presidential victory in 2024.  The GOP has been able to figure out how to manipulate the system to win all the power in Washington.  After that's it's one crisis away from a declaration of martial law the dissolves the Democratic Party in a case of what some progressives might call euthanasia.  And though Manchin may be responsible for stymieing Build back Better and voting-rights legislation by stabbing Biden in the back, he may yet get his.  After all, we remember what happened to Judas after he got his thirty pieces of silver.

(As all this goes on, the U.S. Senate Republican primary in Ohio will decide today who goes up against Democrat Tim Ryan for Rob Portman's Senate seat in November.  "Hillbilly Elegy" author and front-running primary candidate J.D. Vance, who once despised Donald Trump but later sucked up to him and got his endorsement over rival Josh Mandel, could be a formidable nominee against Ryan, a true champion of the working class.  I'm hoping that the GOP nominated whomever Ryan can defeat with little or no effort.  I just don't know who that would be.)