The midterms are right around the corner, and the Democrats have not kept a lot of Joe Biden’s campaign promises.
They haven’t forgiven student loan debt.
They haven’t ended for-profit detention of migrants.
They haven’t decriminalized marijuana.
So far, President Biden and the Democrats haven’t provided high speed internet access for Americans, or made college free for families making less than $125,000 a year, or made two years of community college free.
They haven’t provided a public health insurance option, like Medicare, to Americans.
They haven’t increased the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
They didn’t renew the expanded child tax credit.
There’s more. You can find the status of all of President Biden’s campaign promises on the Poynter Institute’s Campaign Promise Tracker.
Regardless of how you feel about each of those initiatives, those were the promises that got Joe Biden elected.
It’s bad brand management to over promise and under deliver.
And as if that weren’t enough to torpedo the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming elections, there are other image problems.
Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, blasted Pelosi’s reference to the “free market economy” in the first of a series of tweets about the lack of a ban on stock ownership by lawmakers.
“It’s a ridiculous comment!” Shaub wrote. “She might as well have said ‘let them eat cake.’ Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the price of stocks.”
Since last year, [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and her husband Paul Pelosi traded over $50 million in assets, with annualized returns at 69 percent as of October, according to an estimate from the Nancy Pelosi Portfolio Tracker. That’s higher than Buffett, George Soros, Cathie Wood, and other star investors of the past. Members of Congress aren’t required to provide an exact figure for the value of their assets, but Pelosi’s wealth grew by an estimated $16.7 million in 2020, just as millions of Americans fell into poverty and struggled to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s politicians being politicians that got the un-politician Donald Trump elected in 2016. Unless President Joe Biden and the Democrats can deliver on some of their campaign promises in the next eleven months, the Democrats are going to have a bad day at the polls.
Just checking…..
Do you think the other guy would have done better than Biden on these important issues?
I bet that if Donald Trump were facing the kind of existential crisis that the Democrats are facing, he’d be able to galvanize his party to act. Not because he really cares. Because he’s practical.
My biggest concern is not these failures (I didn’t expect any of them to happen this quickly, in the first place), but the failure to get past the fact that the Democrats are still lacking the backbone to end the fricking filibuster, and move ahead! But, Rich makes a very valid point. A party leader, like Pelosi, who says and does what she says and does, sure does not look like a Democrat at all.
The national Dems have become the limousine liberal party totally out of touch with the average American. No surprise they have not made good on their campaign promises.
There is a generational problem here, too, and the Boomer leadership – Pelosi; Schumer; McConnell; Trump; both Clintons; Biden – just won’t die or yield the stage to younger leadership. This happened because no one under 40 has voted for the last 25 years.
I think all those fossils have stopped thinking about reelection and are just trying to figure out how to maximize their wealth before they quit.
And to hell with the rest of the country.