Washington Post: “On the sidelines of a climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Biden exchanged pleasantries with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who asked him how he was doing.”
Said Biden: “So far, so good.”
He added: “There’s this old joke. A guy jumps off a 100-story building. As he passes the 50th floor they asked him how he’s doing. And he says, ‘So far so good.’ ”
“President Joe Biden, just under a year into his presidency, has delivered on a key campaign promise to work across the aisle in order to deliver the largest investment ever in restoring crumbling U.S. roads, bridges and other types of physical infrastructure,” NBC News reports.
“But whether the bill might also shore up the sagging political fortunes of president and his party remained to be seen.”
Washington Post: “The long-sought legislative win came hours after a positive jobs report and encouraging news about an experimental drug to treat covid-19, capping the most topsy-turvy week of Biden’s presidency. On Saturday — after months of absorbing a series of blows that many Democrats felt were largely self-inflicted — Biden at last had something to celebrate.”
Dan Balz: “Democrats have seen this movie before. An election takes place, they examine the results and suddenly lament their poor showing with rural voters. It has happened time and again and yet the party has neither a solution to the problem nor, it seems, a commitment to solving it.”
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“The House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January is poised to issue subpoenas to top Trump lieutenants involved in attempting to subvert the 2020 election results from a ‘command center’ at the Willard hotel in Washington,” The Guardian reports.
“The subpoenas, which could be issued as soon as next week, reflect the select committee’s interest in events at the hotel just across from the White House, where Donald Trump’s most loyal aides plotted to keep him in office.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a poll asking if he should sell Tesla stock to pay taxes.
Musk promised to abide by whatever the results of the poll are, meaning he could potentially be paying taxes on $25 billion of profits.
A Navy ship named for slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk, who served four years in the Navy before being forced out, was christened and launched in San Diego Bay on Saturday, the AP reports.
“A U.S. federal appeals court issued a stay Saturday freezing the Biden administration’s efforts to require workers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, citing ‘grave statutory and constitutional’ issues with the rule,” Reuters reports.
New York Times: “In the jigsaw puzzle that is electoral politics, Democrats have often focused their energy on swingy suburbs and voter-rich cities, content to mostly ignore many white, rural communities that lean conservative. The belief was, in part, that the party had already bottomed out there, especially during the Trump era, when Republicans had run up the numbers of white voters in rural areas to dizzying new heights.”
“Virginia, however, is proof: It can get worse…”
“Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a group that delivers as many as nine out of 10 votes for the party. But some Democratic leaders are now sounding the alarm: What if rural, white voters — of which there are many — start voting that reliably Republican?”
An Atlanta district attorney “is moving toward convening a special grand jury in her criminal investigation of election interference by the former president and his allies,” the New York Times reports.
The inquiry “is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president, given the myriad interactions he and his allies had with Georgia officials, most notably Mr. Trump’s January call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging him to ‘find 11,780 votes’ — enough to reverse the state’s election result.”
NASCAR repudiated its association with “Let’s go, Brandon,” the political rallying cry being used on social media and at various sporting events as an insult directed at President Joe Biden, USA Today reports.
Said NASCAR president Steve Phelps: “I feel for Brandon. I think unfortunately it speaks to the state of where we are as a country. We do not want to associate ourselves with politics, the left or the right. We obviously have and we’ve always had, as a sport, tremendous respect for the office of the president — no matter who is sitting.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told Axios about the choice he faced voting for the bipartisan infrastructure bill last night: “You vote one way, maybe it hurts in the primary. You vote the other way… in my district, it’d hurt me in the general.”
He acknowledged he could face a primary challenger, but he predicted: “I’ll still win.”
“Wine moms won’t save us. Need the beer moms.”
— Wisconsin Democratic operative Irene Lin, quoted by Politico, on the need for Democrats to attract rural voters.
New York Times: “Seeking to bridge the gap between a resolute clutch of balking Democratic moderates and a much larger group of liberals demanding that the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan only pass concurrently with his $1.85 trillion social welfare and climate change bill, the Black lawmakers proposed a plan that initially seemed far too timid and convoluted: pass the infrastructure bill immediately, then hold a good-faith procedural vote on the larger bill that would have to suffice before its final vote in mid-November.”
“Ms. Pelosi agreed to the deal and then, tellingly, sent the low-key chairwoman of the Black Caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, out to waiting reporters to tell the world. In effect, the speaker had harnessed one faction of her unruly Democrats to win over two others, and understood that the soft-spoken African American lawmaker might have had more influence at that point than she did.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi took questions from reporters as she tried to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill:
REPORTER: We’ve seen it this; there’s going to be a vote, there’s not going to be a vote…At a certain point, do you worry that it starts to look like the Democrats can’t get out of their own way?
PELOSI: No. Welcome to my world. This is the Democratic Party.
“In Tuesday’s election, Republicans served notice that the clock is ticking on Democrats’ slim majorities in Congress. On Friday, 13 House Republicans delivered the decisive votes to rescue a key part of President Biden’s agenda — an agenda endangered by those in his own party,” the Washington Post reports.
“And some Republicans are predictably furious — with undersold questions about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) future leadership of the party potentially in the offing.”
Said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL): “I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill.”
“I don’t think that I would have to get many votes to change the results of this race.”
— Roger Stone, quoted by CBS Miami, threatening again to run against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as a Libertarian unless the Florida governor publicly promises not to mount a presidential campaign.
“The six-member City Council of Hamtramck will consist of all Muslims starting in January, another historic first for the metro Detroit city known for its sizable immigrant population,” the Detroit Free Press reports.
Seattle elected its first Republican to city office since at least 1991 as Ann Davison (R) defeated Nicole Thomas-Kennedy (D), a progressive in favor of “abolishing” the police, in the race for city attorney, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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