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Hello and welcome to positively dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

Before we went on break, Republicans were still holding the debt limit hostage,

threatening to hurl the economy in recession, create chaos throughout the world,

unless Democrats paid them policy ransoms.

Well, they got their ransoms, they freed the hostage for the next couple of years,

and now everyone seemingly wants to sweep the whole episode under the rug, pretend it was just

normal government business. I have a lot I want to say about how that fight played out and how it

ended, most of which I'll say for another episode. This week I want to dwell more on what the fight

signified and how Democrats might regroup in its wake.

Before Joe Biden became president, a friend and I were talking about how he might approach his

first term, at least in our fantasy realm. And the idea we landed on was that the best politics

for Biden, the best path towards making his agenda stick, and his best hope for avoiding the

morass that has trapped the last several Democratic presidents would be to act on as many fronts as

possible, move fast and aggressively enough to sort of outpace the system's ability to tie him

up on any one front. Unleash administrative action, do consequential even controversial stuff,

and do it kind of all at once so that it overwhelms the GOP's capacity for affected outrage and

the media's appetite for scandal. We thought of it as like a substantive version of Donald Trump's

...