The New York Times editorial board has warned that the reason Democrats lost the recent Virginia gubernatorial election is that the party is trying to do too much to solve the country’s problems. Its excessive ambition, the Times says, is off-putting to voters who prefer a government that does less, one that simply presides in quiet dignity rather than overstepping its role with such grandiose goals as ending poverty or providing paid family leave.
I am not kidding. The paper cautions that “polls show that many independents already think that the government is trying to do too much to deal with the nation’s problems,” and says that Joe Biden was elected “because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence,” not because he promised substantive policy agenda.
The Times quotes Democratic representative Abigail Spanberger, who says “nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” The Times criticizes the more ambitious parts of the “Build Back Better” agenda, saying that parts of the “electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better.”
The Times editorial should offer pretty definitive proof that the basic ideology of the U.S. media is right-wing, not left-wing. Here we have the great liberal Paper of Record taking the position that the Democratic Party is too aggressive in trying to pass transformative public policies, a position I cannot believe anyone really holds. In fact, the party has spent months scaling back its ambitions. It has failed to pass voting rights and police reform legislation. It has dropped attempts to add dental and vision coverage to Medicare, and dropped Biden’s clean power plan. Joe Biden has resisted pushes to cancel student loan debt. If there is one thing I rarely hear anyone accusing the Democratic Party of, it’s that they’re trying too hard.
