Re:Ohio catastrophe is ‘wake-up call’ to dangers of deadly t...
by paulmd on Monday February 13, 2023 @02:56PM
(#34779362)
Oh, absolutely, nothing here was meant to make Biden/Buttigieg look good. It's notionally their job to fight for all americans even if they don't vote for them. On the other hand republicans would have been 100% uniformly against any sort of a "union win" two months ago, and Democrats are divided themselves as a caucus. It's a case of "of the remaining 50% who can be swayed on an issue, how many support this" and two months ago, before the accident, nobody would have agreed it's a good expenditure of political capital to do so.
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues (and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?) is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too.
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues (and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?) is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too.