There's a classic sketch from comedian Tim Robinson in which a hot dog-shaped car crashes into a store. As the crowd gathers around to find out what happens, a man dressed in an oversized hot dog costume pretends it's not his car.
"We’re all trying to find the guy who did this," he says in a moment that quickly became a meme.
On Thursday, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the hot-dog guy personified as he opined on why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. In an interview with Washington, D.C., insider publication Punchbowl News, he brought up President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill, a $3.5 trillion proposal to do everything from fight climate change to help working-class families.
"When I first [warned] about inflation, they all said I was crazy," Manchin said.
To be fair, he's right that inflation was a factor in Donald Trump's win. Though inflation seems to have cooled from its recent highs, voters are clearly still frustrated by higher prices that began during the coronavirus pandemic and have taken that anger out on the governing party in elections around the world, as multiple people have noted since Tuesday.
Would Biden and Harris have been in a better position if Build Back Better had passed?
But it was weird for Manchin to bring that up in the context of his opposition to Biden's signature proposal because it didn't pass. And the reason it failed was that Manchin opposed it. Build Back Better was the hot dog car that crashed through the store window, and Manchin was the guy driving it.
To the credit of both of them, Biden and Manchin then worked together in secret to craft a smaller $700 billion bill, renamed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is now a signature part of Biden's legacy — at least, until Trump begins undoing chunks of it when he takes office in January.
Would the larger bill have made inflation worse, as Manchin contended? That's a question for economists. But even if the answer is yes, it doesn't matter politically, because Harris lost every swing state anyway. The counterfactual question to ask instead is: Would Biden and Harris have been in a better position if Build Back Better had passed?
At the heart of that question is a debate that has gone on in wonkier Democratic circles since 2021. Coined by commentator Matt Stoller, the idea is called deliverism, and it basically means that you can win re-election by getting things done. "Deliver and it helps you win elections," he wrote. "Don’t deliver and you lose."
The results on Tuesday would seem to be a pretty firm repudiation of that idea. Trump didn't keep more than half his promises in his first term, by one count, including major ideas like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building a wall with Mexico and rebuilding infrastructure. He governed shambolically, with higher turnover in his Cabinet and top appointees than any president since Ronald Reagan. And while the pandemic is largely to blame, he still had the worst job losses in a single term since records began in 1939.
While Trump didn't deliver, Biden largely did, including on some of Trump's promises.
Along with the Inflation Reduction Act, his legislative record includes a pandemic stimulus measure, massive spending on infrastructure and a boost to the domestic manufacturing of superconductors. He also had a lot of smaller kitchen-table achievements, including a cap on the price of insulin, lower prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients and a crackdown on junk fees. He is on track to end his term having added jobs every month in office, something no president has done since records began in 1939.
Biden's approval rating has been underwater since September 2021.
None of that helped. Biden's approval rating has been underwater since September 2021, he was on track to lose to Trump in the presidential election, and many Democrats are now blaming his decision not to drop out sooner for Harris' loss.
So what could Biden have done differently? The mismanaged end of the Afghanistan war seems to have been a major turning point, as that's when approval ratings first dropped. That seems to have convinced a number of Americans that he wasn't managing things well at home, either. It's now also clear that he should have dropped out earlier and given the party time to hold a competitive primary campaign, which might have led to a different nominee or given Harris a chance to distance herself better from Biden.
But if we want to debate what Biden should have done to put the Democratic ticket in a better place, we should start with what he wanted to do and couldn't. That includes all of the provisions of the Build Back Better bill that Manchin killed that didn't make it into the Inflation Reduction Act.
The list includes most of the social safety net expansion that Biden campaigned on: universal preschool; help with child care and elder care costs; dental, vision and hearing coverage under Medicare; 12 weeks of paid family leave; more affordable housing; free community college tuition; health insurance for lower-income families; and the extension of a temporary child tax credit that was shown to have lifted 3 million children out of poverty.
The problem with deliverism is that it presumes voters will notice if you govern well. But people are busy. They increasingly get their news from partisan sources and social media, and they don't trust objective data about things like the economy anymore. How are they going to know you are governing well? To break through that wall of indifference, a president needs not only to deliver, but to do it in such a tangible way that voters notice and connect the results with the president's actions. You might call it direct-deliverism.
A good example of this is the stimulus checks. In an unprecedented decision, Trump put his name on the stimulus checks sent out during the early days of the pandemic. Biden didn't. Was that a cheap publicity stunt by Trump? Yeah, but it surely didn't hurt.
In the end, inflation may have weighed down Biden and Harris so much that there was nothing they could do. But if there were anything that might have helped turn the tide, it would have been the kind of immediate and obvious benefits like universal preschool, paid leave and free community college, delivered directly to voters with all credit due to the president. Thanks to Manchin, the Biden-Harris administration couldn't deliver on those, and Harris lost.
And like the man said, we're all trying to find the guy who did this.
