You'll have to excuse us, but even with all the other political shocks this week, the one that shocked us the most was reading that Congress is going to take the next week off. For Veterans' Day. No, seriously. It's not like they have any pressing business or anything, right? They probably need the whole week to lie back and relax and rest up -- so they'll be in real good shape for the extended Thanksgiving Day break, later this month.

Sorry, too snarky? You'll have to forgive us, but please everyone let's remember this moment when all the politicians whine on television, a few weeks hence: "But there's just no time to get everything done! We've got all these deadlines staring us in the face! Waaah! Poor us!" Please, let's all remember at that point that they all thought they deserved an entire week off at the beginning of November. For Veterans' Day -- a holiday that most workers don't even get a single day off for.

This, obviously, is what has been pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to try to get both important bills voted on before the weekend [note: there is no word, as of this writing, as to whether she will succeed or not...]. But we do have to wonder what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is thinking. Perhaps he needs to have a nice long chat with Harry Reid. When Reid ran the Senate, the one tactic he used that was more effective than anything else was to threaten the loss of vacation time. Without that arrow in his quiver, Reid would have gotten far less done -- that's just a political fact.

So why didn't Chuck Schumer announce that everyone could take next week off... right after a vote on the Build Back Better bill. No vote? No vacation, period. Any parent worth his or her salt will recognize this tactic: "We're all just going to sit right here and not have dessert until you eat up all your lima beans, Mister!"

This would have put the maximum pressure possible on Senator Joe Manchin, because it wouldn't just be most Democrats begging him to get to a deal, it would have been all 99 other senators pressuring him to do so. Everyone knows full well he is the stumbling block, so he would have to bear the entire blame for them all losing a vacation week. Just ask Harry Reid how well this works in real life -- he'll tell you.

Sadly, this does not appear to be in the cards. Astonishingly, Manchin is now telling all his fellow Democrats: "What's the rush?" and suggesting that maybe we should all wait -- maybe six months or so -- until we see whether inflation changes or not (here's his actual quote: "I truly believe that we need to slow down -- we need to wait and see if inflation is transitory"). And neither Schumer nor President Joe Biden seems able to do anything about it.

Joe Biden was sold to the Democratic base (during the primaries) at least partly as the guy who could get things done in Congress. He had been in the Senate forever, he knew the ins and outs of passing legislation, therefore he would the second coming of L.B.J.

Things haven't exactly worked out that way, to put it mildly. "Infrastructure Week" has morphed from a joke about how Donald Trump couldn't cut a deal in Congress to the same joke about Joe Biden. That's pretty devastating, but it's true. Granted, Biden is a lot closer now than Trump ever got, but until he gets over the finish line the joke will remain valid.

Of course, the really grim news this week came from the ballot box. The off-off-year elections across the country were nothing short of another serious shellacking for the Democrats. It wasn't just in Virginia and New Jersey, either -- Democrats lost in places that Republicans really had no business winning in. All over the place.

It was bad. Really bad. And it was no fun to watch, we can certainly attest to that.

The leader of the state senate in New Jersey -- a guy the state's teachers' Union spent over five million dollars in a previous and unsuccessful attempt to unseat him -- lost to a truck-driver who made his own campaign videos on his phone and spent only a few thousand bucks, total, on his campaign. It was that bad.

This better be a gigantic wake-up call for the entire Democratic Party. First and foremost, they need to strike the damn deal and pass the damn bills in Congress. Joe Biden's agenda is very close to two very big victories -- but that's been true for months now. The public is just sick of hearing about it. So get across the finish line, before Thanksgiving so Democrats can have something to brag about at the family table this year. That's important. Critically important, in fact.

And second, Democrats really need to figure out how to combat all the fearmongering from Republicans on the subject of education. Maybe this was the biggest factor in Terry McAuliffe's loss in the Virginia governor's race and maybe it wasn't, but statistical analyses really don't matter at this point -- because the Republican Party is totally convinced that is exactly what happened, and they have not been shy about telegraphing their plans to ride this hobbyhorse right through the 2022 midterm elections.

Democrats better be ready, and they better have a much better plan for countering all the "Critical Race Theory" hornswoggle, because Terry McAuliffe's "I'm just going to ignore this issue and hope it goes away" strategy is just not going to work.

If Democrats can fight back on the education front, they'll have a chance next year. If they don't develop a workable strategy on this issue, they're going to get absolutely creamed. McAuliffe's "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach" gaffe may have killed his chances, but it doesn't have to drag the rest of the party down next year. There is still time.

All in all, however, it's been a pretty brutal week, so we're not even going to get into any of the minor stuff that was also going on. Instead we're going to concentrate (in a rant in the Talking Points segment) on two tactics the Democrats need to deploy immediately. So there's that to look forward to.

And, to close on an optimistic note: maybe next week will be better for the Democrats. At this point, it'd be pretty impossible for it to be any worse than the week that was.

We are sorry to report that absolutely nobody in the Democratic Party truly impressed us, this week. Was there some silver lining we missed? Please let us know about it in the comments, but for the life of us we can't think of anyone who was a ray of sunshine in the midst of this dismal week, sorry.

Well, we suppose that President Joe Biden had a pretty good day today. He (finally) rolled out his vaccine mandate for healthcare workers and his COVID testing mandate for all workers in companies with 100 or more employees. This has (mostly) been wrongly reported by the media as a "vaccine mandate for private companies," which it is not. It is a testing mandate, unlike the one for healthcare workers. That's it. Nobody's going to be forced to do anything other than get regularly tested, but that point always gets lost in the debate when Republicans start bellowing about their precious "freedom" to infect as many people as possible.

Biden also got some very happy news on the jobs front today, as the economy added more than half a million new jobs last month. This shows that the Delta variant spike is now almost completely over (at least, as far as the economy is concerned) and this will pay big political dividends for Biden going forward.

Of course, Biden is already "once bitten, twice shy" on the matter, because we all remember how optimistic the beginning of July was, when (pre-Delta) we all thought that maybe, possibly the whole pandemic was about to fade into the rearview mirror. And then those hopes were dashed.

So Biden probably won't sound quite as victorious as he did for Independence Day. But at this point, things are certainly all heading in the right direction. Vaccine mandates, as Biden is fond of pointing out, work. They convince millions of holdouts to just get the damn shot already. And the more that do, the closer we all get to the point of herd immunity. Getting a vaccine approved for children ages 5 through 11 will certainly help too, as shots are already going into kids' arms.

Add all of this up and the picture actually looks pretty rosy, heading forward. The economy is bouncing back from Delta, the population is bouncing back from Delta, and as more and more people get vaccinated the chances of another big spike this winter get lower and lower.

So we suppose Biden had a pretty good day, today, but at the same time we just don't feel it was personally impressive enough for him to get the main award. So we're only going to hand him an Honorable Mention instead. Maybe it's a function of the overall Democratic malaise of this week, but that's how we feel.

There was no shortage of Democrats who massively disappointed us this week, since it really was that grim of a week.

But we're going with the obvious, here.

The Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week was Terry McAuliffe. His loss in the Virginia governor's race is going to reverberate across the midterm election landscape for months to come. By failing to win, McAuliffe effectively dragged the entire party down with him. Now, this is at least partially due to the political media's obsession with this one off-off-year race, but we've got a few choice things to say to the media a little later on, so we'll just let it go at that (for now).

From multiple reports, McAuliffe was just a terrible candidate. This doesn't really surprise us much, as we were never all that big a fan of his in the first place. McAuliffe, please remember, was Bill Clinton's "fundraiser-in-chief." He convinced rich people to donate money to the Clinton cause. That's his claim to fame, politically.

For doing so in such spectacular fashion, he was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Democratic Party (a job frequently filled by prolific fundraisers, to be fair).

But then he decided to have his own political career, and he chose to run for Virginia governor. Not only did he win, but he broke the historical mold -- he won in a year (2013) that traditionally should have gone to the party who lost the previous year's White House race. Barack Obama won his second term, and then McAuliffe won in Virginia. He was trying to repeat this political gravity-defying feat again this year, and he failed.

But while I've never been a big fan of McAuliffe (or, for that matter, any former fundraisers deciding to run for any public office), it was indeed a disappointing loss. It creates some stiff headwinds for all Democrats heading into next year's congressional elections.

So we're going to go ahead and hand Terry McAuliffe this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week, since by volume he disappointed more Democrats than anyone else. At least other Democrats will hopefully be able to learn from the many mistakes McAuliffe made along the way -- that's about the only silver lining to be found, at this point.

[Terry McAuliffe is now nothing more than a private citizen, and it has always been our policy not to provide contact information for such persons, sorry.]

Volume 640 (11/5/21)

This week we feel a rant coming on, as we are occasionally wont to do. Because as we see it, two interconnected things need to happen immediately, if Democrats are going to have any prayer in next year's midterms.

The first is that Democrats need to start tooting their own horn, and as loudly as possible. Start by talking about what is actually contained in the Build Back Better plan. At this point, we all know the basics of what will be included, and even if one or more items is left on the cutting room floor, Democrats should still try to talk it all up in the hopes of later getting everything passed. Build enthusiasm, even for the parts that might not make it this time around -- this will pay off politically, in the end.

The second thing is something the Republicans are just painfully better at than Democrats -- work the media refs. Try to shame journalists into doing their damn jobs. Refuse to engage on whatever shiny object they're currently obsessed with, and instead just plow forward with why they should be talking about other things. And do not hesitate to point out the glaring bias in the coverage so far -- where Republicans have all but disappeared from the conversation entirely. At least on the subject of meaningful things Democrats are trying to accomplish, at any rate.

Here is precisely what we are talking about, coming from a few people who should know:

"I've been looking at some numbers today and I'm shocked at the number of people who actually feel that this bill [Build Back Better] is going to contribute to the deficit," said Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.). "This bill is paid for, it won't contribute one dime to the deficit. This bill's got tax cuts in it."

"People don't realize it and they think that taxes are going up because people have lied to them," Clyburn added.

Others who have spent months taking the pulse of the electorate offered similar assessments about what they described as the vague and non-assertive nature of the White House's approach.

"Nobody's ever heard of 'human infrastructure,'" said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican pollster who supported Biden's 2020 bid, in reference to a term the White House uses frequently to describe their social spending bill. "No one knows what 'reconciliation' is, nobody knows what's in it. All they know is the price tag.... They're just like, 'Why isn't Biden talking to us? Where's Kamala Harris?' Like we're lurching from crisis to crisis, and no one's talking to us."

["Veteran Democratic strategist and Clinton White House political adviser Paul"] Begala defended the White House's overall strategy for handling Congress and chalked up the president's low approval numbers to the fact that his fate rests in the hands of a split Senate and closely divided House. But he also said Biden should be more outfront in "explaining the process."

"He should say, 'you know why this is so hard? Because I have to get every one of the Democrats. You know why? Because Republicans will not give me even one from their party," for a bill that would boost child care and lower prescription drug costs, Begala said. "Make them pay a price for absolute intransigence against a very, very popular agenda."

The way to change all of this is to work those refs in the media. With a vengeance. So far, progressives like Bernie Sanders have been making this attempt, but it really needs a party-wide effort. Because after one solid week of every Democrat singing from this songbook, the media would sheepishly begin to change their tune, too. But that's really the only way it is going to happen.

So here is our "Work The Refs" Rant, instead of discrete talking points. It was just impossible to limit the whole thing into seven little bites. Here is what we would dearly love to hear some Democrat say in the very near future, while being interviewed by some political pundit on some Sunday morning political chatfest.

A "Work The Refs" Rant

You know what? I listen to the media report on what is going on in Washington, and it's like the Republican Party has ceased to exist. Seriously -- they have gotten such a free pass from you guys it's not even funny.

You know why tens of millions of parents are getting $300 checks in the mail each month? Because Democrats did that. Not a single Republican voted for the idea -- not one. So why hasn't anyone in the media asked them why they were against it? If we can get the Build Back Better bill on President Biden's desk, these payments will continue for another year. And not a single Republican is going to vote for it, most likely. Why? I have no idea -- maybe you should ask them. On behalf of those tens of millions of parents who get that $300 check each month.

There are not only 50 senators in the United States Senate. There are 100. And yet 50 of them have magically disappeared from the political conversation, all year long. I can't even remember when I last saw the likes of Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romney on television, answering journalists' questions. Remember them? The so-called sane and responsible Republicans? Why are they going to vote against $300 checks for parents? Might be interesting to hear them answer that question, don't you think? But the only way that's ever going to happen is if someone asks them.

Democrats might not have such serious problems with two of our own members if the opposition party had been a little more reasonable. If we could have counted on Collins or Murkowski's vote, then Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would have been out in the cold. We've already stripped the Build Back Better bill to the absolute bone compared to what it could have been, so how could any reasonable Republican not be at least a little interested in it? I have no idea, personally. Neither does anyone else.

How can people like Murkowski and Collins and Romney vote against paid family leave for all American workers? How can the Republican Party claim to be fighting for the little guy when they just won't, when the chips are down? Why is it that every other advanced nation on Earth provides generous family leave for all workers, but somehow Americans don't deserve it? That is the position of the Republican Party, but you sure wouldn't ever know that from watching the political press.

There's a reason the Republican Party has long been in love with social hot-button wedge issues and that reason is a simple one: because they don't want to talk about their policy positions. They don't want the media to ask them these questions, and you're doing a bang-up job of letting them get away with it -- by always focusing on the shiny and distracting object they dangle in front of you instead of asking: "Why should a mother with a newborn not get -- at the very minimum -- four weeks paid time off from work?" What is so ideologically wrong about that simple concept? Again, seems like a dandy question to ask a few Republicans.

There are a whole bunch of questions just like this that I would really love to hear the official Republican answer to: Why shouldn't child care be affordable for all families? Why shouldn't elder in-home care be affordable? Why shouldn't seniors be able to afford a hearing aid? Or a visit to the dentist? Or new eyeglasses? What is so scary and 'socialistic' about these simple concepts? I mean, what... we're going to suddenly become the Soviet Union if Granny is able to see and hear and chew again? Seriously?

If Republicans want to come out publicly and explain why they think Americans should pay an insane amount of money for prescriptions that are actually affordable in every other country on the planet, I would truly enjoy hearing why. Why is preserving the staggeringly obscene profits of the drug companies somehow so much more important than making sure some random diabetic is actually able to afford enough insulin to survive? It's pretty easy to see where the GOP's priorities are -- or it would be, if they were ever put on the spot and had to defend such an indefensible position. And yet every single Republican is going to vote against cheaper prescription drugs for all Americans. And they're getting a complete free pass from the media while they do so.

Journalists have known about each and every one of these programs for months, now. And yet all you can talk about is the total price of the Build Back Better bill. That's it. That has been the sum total of your coverage from the very beginning. But in all that obsessing over the price tag, did you ever bother to point out that the whole thing will be paid for? For that matter, when you interview Joe Manchin and he starts waffling on about inflation and the national debt and the deficit and all the rest of it -- has any journalist bothered to ask him point-blank why the bipartisan infrastructure bill he helped write shouldn't be measured by the same criteria? That bill is not paid for, because that was the only way Manchin and Sinema could get any Republicans to vote for it -- because Republicans are now apparently the party of fiscal irresponsibility. Democrats swore we wouldn't do that with the Build Back Better plan, and we didn't -- remember, we had originally planned it to be twice as big, so raising half the revenue to pay for it was actually pretty easy. But is this fact even mentioned in all the media stories about getting it through Congress? Even, like, once?

If so, I must have missed it.

Yeah, we're raising taxes. On millionaires. Our tax won't even kick in until after you've earned and paid the normal tax rates on your first 10 million dollars of income per year. So please spare me all the Republican nonsense about how "Democrats are raising everybody's taxes!" Because "everybody" really means "everybody making more than $10 million dollars a year." Please go out there and find me one single firefighter, teacher, nurse, cop, or really any normal American worker who will be affected by this -- I dare you! Good luck with that one....

And, yeah, we're raising taxes on corporations. We're going to make it impossible for companies like Amazon and Google to pay zero taxes at all. Please explain to me how that's a bad thing, or how we're going to suddenly become Venezuela because Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have to pay some corporate taxes instead of nothing at all. I'd like to hear that explanation, I really would. So would the American public, I'd wager.

Republicans have been getting a free pass for far too long from you guys. Democrats have a plan to deal with climate change. We have a lot of ideas on this subject, as a matter of fact. Some will make it in to the Build Back Better plan, some will have to wait. But at least we have ideas, because we are sane and live in the real world and we admit the problem exists. Republicans -- far too many of them -- just don't. They refuse to even admit there's a problem, so their answer to it all is to just do nothing. You know the last time I heard a journalist mention this fact? Must have been back in the aughts, maybe when George W. was president. It's been quite a while, that's for sure.

For Pete's sake, when the bipartisan infrastructure bill comes up for a vote in the House, nobody expects more than a handful -- 10, maybe -- of the Republicans to vote for it. This isn't the Democrats-only bill, mind you, this is the one that's supposed to be bipartisan. And yet almost all the House Republicans are going to vote against new roads and new bridges and clean lead-free water and all the rest of it. And not a single one of them will likely ever be put on the spot for this vote by you guys in the media. I have no idea why, but at this point that's a pretty safe assumption to make.

OK, maybe Democrats as a whole and Joe Biden in particular haven't done the best salesmanship job on all of this. Sure, I'll admit that. Biden doesn't have to be Trump, but wouldn't it be nice for him to provide at least one tweet that people actually started talking about? The media world has changed a lot since Joe Biden entered the Senate, that's for sure. Maybe he needs to get a little more modern and get his message out in a lot more ways than he currently does. There is certainly room for improvement there. But it takes two to tango -- if Biden does tweet something that isn't outrageous or insulting or just flat-out insane, the media's got to do their part by discussing it in a sober manner. That would certainly help.

So, yeah, I'd be happy to take your questions about any aspect of the Democratic agenda you'd care to talk about. Sure -- ask away! I'd be happy to discuss any or all of what Joe Biden is trying to accomplish -- making good on all the campaign promises he made to the American people. Sure, let's talk about that! But I would really appreciate it if you'd bring these same subjects up when you interview Republicans, instead of always being so happy and so willing to dive down all their hot-button rabbit holes. Let them rant about whatever it is Fox News is freaking out about, and then maybe you could just pivot to ask them why they are so adamantly against Grandpa being able to see or hear again. Because that is what Democrats are fighting for, and that is what Republicans are fighting against. It's pretty basic, really. All it needs is for someone to actually, you know, commit an act of journalism by asking them about it.

But I'm not going to hold my breath or anything.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant