Obama Adviser Rattner Warns Dems: Biden Has No Mandate

BUCK: Why are things going poorly for the economy for America right now? Important question. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show as we try to answer that question every day. And add a little detail, a little bit of fact, a little bit of analysis. But we’re not the only ones that think things aren’t going that well right now. That’s obvious from the polling. But even some Democrats are recognizing that the response to, “Oh, my gosh. Inflation’s getting really bad” should not be “let’s spend more money in a nonemergency spending bill than at any time since the 1960s, since the creation of the American welfare state.

Let’s not do that right now — that’s not going to help. Forget about whether that’s the country we want to live in and whether we should become a European-style welfare state and all the rest. I don’t mean forget about it. I mean just put it aside for a second. What does it do to the economic challenges that we see right now? And here’s my buddy Steve Rattner —

CLAY: Ah, there we go.

BUCK: Steve, not the other guy. Rattner, who wrote that op-ed who I mentioned earlier in the week, whose gone around, this is a guy, he’s trying to raise the alarm for Democrats by saying, “What you’re doing is really bad.” Now, this is a guy who’s a lib but he understands money. He understands monetary policy. He was a private equity guy. And, unlike economists, he actually had to be right or else he goes broke, right? So, he’s a savvy guy about money. Here’s what he says about why Biden is unpopular.

RATTNER: I think Afghanistan was a disaster. It may well pass, but there’s nobody in America pretty much who thinks it was handled well. The border is another huge problem that the public perceives to be a result of Biden encouraging people, the idea that it was gonna be a different attitude than Trump, people should come and try to cross the border. That’s another huge problem. He’s basically cast himself as a transformational president, one who’s going to be LBJ and FDR put together. But the problem is he didn’t really have a mandate to do that. LBJ, when he was president, had a 169 seat majority in the House, and he had 69 Senate seats of Democrats. So he actually had a mandate.

BUCK: Absolutely correct analysis, from an Obama adviser, everybody.

CLAY: I think one of the things that Obama — people are seeing is, one, they don’t trust the competency of Biden. But there was so much “orange man bad” associated with Trump which all of us out there listening to right now know how unfair it was. But now that Biden is in charge, there seems to be a rationality in some parts of the Democratic Party returning. That’s an eminently reasonable, rational analysis of the Joe Biden presidency that’s all devastating because it’s coming from a rational member of the Obama administration. I think the Democrat Party has gone so insane that you’re starting to see people push back now that Trump is out of office. And that’s why I think ultimately this civil war in the Democratic Party is gonna get exposed in 2022 and also in 2024.

BUCK: I think that’s absolutely right. I think that they’ve got a huge problem here because they have the left-wing base that they need to show off but also for donations and enthusiasm, you know, energy in elections. They think this is their time. I think there are some in the Democrat Party who realize the more the American people figure out the Green New Deal madness, the open borders agenda, these are not popular ideas with most of America. That’s why the Biden administration pretends they don’t want illegal immigration. That’s why they pretend they don’t want to make gas prices skyrocket, right, to make electricity companies based on coal go bankrupt. They do want that, but they won’t be honest about it. And as people see what’s really going on, I think they’re gonna revolt.