If you watched the video of Utah Republican Party convention delegates booing Mitt Romney yesterday, you saw some pretty angry, ignorant assholes. They are way out of synch with mainstream America. In fact, they are way out of synch with mainstream Salt Lake County, where Biden beat Trump 289,906 (53.4%) to 230,174 (42.5%), as well. Unlike the Utah Republican delegates, most Americans think Biden is doing a good job and most Americans are feeling optimistic about the direction of the country, at least according to a new poll by Ipsos for ABC News. 64% say they are optimistic and 36% (almost entirely partisan Republicans) say they are pessimistic about the next year.
This graphic shows who people blame for whatever gridlock is developing. 60% credit Biden with working towards compromise with the congressional Republicans, while 67% feel McConnell and McCarthy are not doing enough to work with him in a bipartisan way.
Knee-jerk conservative Democrats Manchin, Sinema and, to a lesser extent, Coons (Biden's Senate spokesmodel) have put the kibosh on passing the infrastructure bill via reconciliation, at least for now. The trio have played right into McConnell's hands of delay, delay, delay, water down, water down, water down all for the sake of a foolish concept-- "bipartisanship"--that the GOP laughs at but is always happy to whine and scream about to further their own Big Money interests. On the talking heads shows today, the Republicans were all singing from the same hymnal: the one about a third of the country blindly follows as well: it's all "Socialism!!!!!!"
McConnell puppet Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was on Fox News Sunday moaning about how the two sides as "far apart" because the Democrats are trying to accomplish too much beyond filling potholes and preventing bridges from collapsing. Most voters disagree with Cassidy's-- and the Republican Party's-- arguments and prefer the more expansive plan Biden has laid out. Hefty majorities of Democrats and independents support each part of Biden's proposals and even majorities of Republican voters are with Biden on everything but clean energy, addressing racial inequality and electric vehicle charging stations.
What the Republicans will oppose to their last breath is raising corporate taxes to pay for anything and that's the crux of the problem... even if most Americans agree that corporate taxes need to be raised. Another McConnell mouthpiece, John Barrasso (R-WY), who was on This Week, was also whining about "trillions and trillions of dollars of reckless spending... When I look at this, this is a staggering amount of spending, like someone with a new credit card, and these are for things that we don’t necessarily need, we certainly can’t afford, but they’re going to delight the liberal left of the party... It's almost creating an addiction to spending." So far, Americans disagree with the right-wing propaganda:
Manchin's favorite senator, Susan Collins (R-ME), was on State of the Union, largely towing the tired and predictable conservative line: "That's the amount that we spent to win World War II... [T]his is an enormous package when you take both the traditional core infrastructure parts and the huge expansion of social programs that the president is advocating." She was adamantly opposed to the 28% rate for corporate taxes, a rate that is still far below the pre-Trump 35%. She said she will never compromise on that, basically daring the Democrats to even try to use reconciliation when she knows she has Manchin in her pocket.
To better understand why the conservative kvetching has been falling on deaf ears among those not already brainwashed, it's was worth reading Patricia Cohen's essay for the NY Times this morning-- Biden's Proposals Aim To Give Sturdier Support The The Middle Class. "Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming," she wrote, "to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play... If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market. Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills... Biden, too, wants to fix roads and bridges, upgrade electric grids and invest in research. But his administration has also concluded that a 21st-century economy requires much more, from expanded access to high-speed broadband, which more than a third of rural inhabitants lack, to parental leave and higher wages for child care workers.