Politics & Government
Biden deserves good grades
However, state Rep. Josh Elliott says Democrats have failed to address working-class concerns
By Scott Benjamin
HAMDEN – How did a Bernie guy become a Biden Bro?
State Rep. Josh Elliott (D-88) of Hamden says, “I think he was good president. I think he was an effective president. It wasn’t like it was with Jimmy Carter where in four years he couldn’t get anything done and he was gone. Biden got a lot done” despite his subpar poll ratings.
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This from someone who carried the flag in 2016 for Socialist Party U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (VT) bid for the Democratic nomination and then ran a successful insurgent campaign for a state House seat that was held by former Speaker Brendan Sharkey, Democrat of Hamden.
About Biden, Elliott said during an interview with Patch.com, “I was expecting it to be more of a disappointment than it ended up being. I think he is one of the strongest presidents we’ve had on union issues.”
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Former Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson has stated that the decline in union membership since World War II has been “stunning.”
He has written, “In 2010, unions represented 6.9 percent of private-sector workers. That's lower than the 12 percent in 1929, before passage of the 1935 Wagner Act — the National Labor Relations Act — which gave workers the right to organize and required employers to recognize unions that won a secret ballot.”
Elliott also praised Biden for seeking to reduce the power of corporate “monopolies.”
Did Biden do enough to elevate the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $7.25 per hour since 2009?
“No, he didn’t,” said Elliott, who was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Elliott, a deputy House speaker, said that if the federal minimum wage had progressed along with the rest of the economy since the 1970s, it would now be “$25 or $26” an hour.
On January 1, Connecticut will have a minimum wage of $16.35 an hour – more than a $6 increase from 2017.
Remarked Elliott, “I think Connecticut shows the country what it looks like. Even Connecticut has a way to go.”
Beyond that, he said that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, should have focused her campaign more on pay, benefits and the way people do their tasks.
Elliott said that the Democrats raised more money, knocked on more doors and made more phone calls than any American political party had done.
“However, who you really lost in this election was the middle class,” he exclaimed.
“I think there was a tendency to move away from hard policy decisions,” commented Elliott. “I think there was a fear of ostracizing components of their political constituency.”
Former two-time Connecticut Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill Curry of Farmington said in a phone interview with Patch.com, “The Democratic Party was not taken over by a bunch of woke English professors. It was taken over by multi-national corporations and their lobbyists. It relies on the wealthy’s money more so than any political party in the last 75 years.”
In Connecticut, the Democrats added four seats in the state House, bringing them to 102 seats – slightly more than two-thirds of the chamber. They added one seat in the state Senate, giving them 25 members, one more than a two-thirds majority.
Elliott said that turnout in the cities, a long-time Democratic stronghold, has diminished over recent election cycles.
He said that since 2018 the party has been adding voters in the suburbs.
Government Professor Gary Rose of Sacred Heart University has said that suburban women in Connecticut have trended more Democrat in recent elections, partly because of President-elect Donald Trump’s personal behavior.
Regarding the Democrats’ growing strength in Connecticut’s suburbs, Elliott said, “There is a question of how sustainable it is.”
Recent post-election New York Times focus group interviewees indicated that immigration was their top concern.
Said Elliott, “We had a chance to get a strong immigration law approved. The problem was they couldn’t get it approved with just the support of Democrats.”
He claims the Republicans in Congress thwarted the bill so “they had an issue that they could keep talking about.” He said, for example, former state Rep. Mike France (R-42) of Gales Ferry ran a campaign in the Second Congressional District that underscored immigration.
Texas A&M presidential scholar George Edwards has that said presidents usually can’t change public opinion, so they should determine where there might be two or three opportunities and then try to exploit them.
Did Biden try to do too much too soon without gauging public opinion?
Elliott said we have “disparate venues of communication,” ranging from social media to traditional media.
“I think the polarization is really intense and people are getting their information from impoverished sources,” he explained. “I’m not sure [the presidency] is the bully pulpit that it was supposed to be.”
However, would it have been better to have just focused on the 2021 infrastructure bill and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act?
Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip has stated that there really wasn’t a need for the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that Biden signed in March 2021.
Elliott said, “There was Incredible stress to address the pandemic. There was so much fear of people being out of work.”
After suffering the worst presidential loss since former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was trounced by Republican former President George H.W. Bush in 1988, what do the Democrats have to do?
Departing U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel recently told New York Times columnist Bret Stephens that the party needs to return to the Bill Clinton era. Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, said the former president picked as many fights with the Democratic progressives as he did with Republicans.
Emanuel commented, “As I always say to the left, what part of the peace and prosperity were you most upset with? Which part did you hate? Was it the income growth, the employment growth, the drop in welfare rolls, the drop in crime, the fact that America was respected around the world, peace in the Middle East? Which part did you hate most?”
A poll in early 2001 indicated that Clinton was leaving office with a 65 percent approval rating.
Elliott remarked, “I know that some people think that Clinton was a moderate and he created a working-class constituency that was untouchable. I don’t know that that was accurate.”
“I’m not sure how good his policies were over the long term,” he added.
Elliott said Clinton deregulated banks, which led to the 2008 Great Recession. Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) has said some big banks were over-leveraged as much as 40:1 - well beyond a reasonable ratio.
Elliott added that the former president reduced capital gains taxes, which were “a giveaway for the top 1 and 2 percent.”
We need “economic populism,” he said. “Focus on the middle class. The budget is a moral document.”
Resources:
Interview with Josh Elliott, Patch.com, on Saturday, December 7, 2024.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Phone interview with Bill Curry, Friday, December 6, 2024.
Interview with Ned Lamont, The Housatonic Times, October 2009.
George Edwards, “The Strategic President,” Princeton University Press, 2009.
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
https://www.wsj.com/economy/bi...
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/harding-wants-freeze-state-employee-wages-least-two-years
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/panel-insists-stefanowski-lost-election-because-two-enemie
