return to normalcy, somebody who was not chaotic and someone who was a centrist. i think that s what people thought they were getting when they voted for joe biden, including a lot of people who are, you know, suburban nights. people in loudoun county, for example, who are sophisticated, probably work in washington, d.c., but they moved to loudoun county for a reason, right? they wanted to get away from some of the chaos. so i think what happened is they were in a sense radicalized, basically by two things. you ha the failure to, you know, pass not just a social agenda but the infrastructure stuff, but also i think the culture war stuff resonated with them. and then you had a guy a republican, who seemed like mitt romney, who seemed non-threatening. so these voters are up for grabs, i think is the message, and democrats, i think, prematurely thought they were part of the coalition and they
republicans are absent. and the media doesn t spend must have time saying why aren t there any republicans in that room? they were there to get the infrastructure stuff for their own client. they probably have people who give them money, maybe they think they ll get something there. it struck me today, current, i ll give you the final word on this, the difference fundamentally is democrats look at their base and try to figure out how to please all of these different kinds of people. because the democratic base is varied. it s multicultural, multiracial, multireligious. they have to figure out how to make all of those people work together. republicans say to their base. what do you want? oh, okay, you re okay with white nationalism? we can work with that. you don t like the fact that donald trump lost? you want to go ahead and break into the capitol and do an insurrection? okay. we ll figure out how to work with that. you want to maybe not be so anti-neo-naziism, you want to play with n
infrastructure stuff and say this is a guy with a firm grasp of how to do the job. and for independent, i think the competence part of it is a bigger driver than the ideological part of it, but you put the two many tandem, that he s way too left wing and he s bad at getting it done, and people are like what the hell is going on here? jon: very quickly, he s going out on the road to try to sell these big spending bills. how do you expect him to do? not too great. you know, he, he is not great at convincing people who don t already agree with him. you know, his best asset is that he s general ily likable to most americans, maybe not to republicans or anything, but he is he s not great at selling stuff. and the one thing he was good at selling was himself, and he s just sort of betrayed that image that he sold the voters on about being this moderate, middle of
adding less, but by way of context, $3.5 trillion, like there s two comparison points and would i say one of them is two decades of war in iraq and afghanistan. we know that s somewhere in the ballpark of $2 trillion and the other is the 2017 republican donald trump tax cut. just a little bit north of $2 trillion so even if you took half of what the democrats are swinging for the fences on it would be at once massive and substantial and also comparable to what republicans have done in recent years to increase the debt ceiling projections so i think somewhere in that space is where a negotiation would happen. if anyone was in the mood to negotiate, but like the water just hasn t boiled yet. we re looking at the clock thinking, okay, and it s not a real deadline the way the way the shutdown is a real deadline. that s midnight tonight and it s the end of the fiscal year and, you know, everything turns into a pumpkin. the only reason today is a deadline for the infrastructure stuff is be
bill we have an electric vehicle infrastructure i could go through a list of issues that everybody agrees on. and yes, we have a lot of strong-willed people right now but we got to get it figured out, because it is either mutual disruption or we are going to do what s right for the country in this once in a lifetime opportunity to make a difference in so many people s lives. you say that failure is not an option, but you know that it is actually a possibility. it is something that could happen where do things stand now as it relates to the discussions between more progressive wing and moderate wing? you heard, i m sure, progressives, say they need an ironclad agreement on reconciliation to go forward with the bipartisan infrastructure stuff what does that look like and where are those conversations? so i want to be really candid here, because everybody knows i am anyway, but one of the things is that more of the house members need to be spoken to period there s been what does t