Hi, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

Starting about a year ago, things started to go sideways for Democrats in the Biden era.

And once it did, the onslaught of bad news never really let up.

I think you can actually see the snowball start rolling in the very early days when President

Biden and his majorities in Congress were doing a lot of stuff.

His approval was steady for a while, but his disapproval started ticking up almost right

away as Republicans launched a barrage of culture war attacks and Democrats were loathed to

answer them.

Then there was the Afghanistan withdrawal, or, in my view, more accurately, the way the

mainstream and right wing media teamed up to cover the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Then Bill back better went bust, then inflation and gas prices started ticking up, then Russia

invaded Ukraine, which made prices rise further.

The Omacron variant and sub-variance kept the pandemic burning, right wing judges

foil the administration's plans on a variety of fronts, and then, of course, the Supreme

Court overturned Rovy Wade.

But then more recently, something kind of weird happened.

Actually, I don't think it's weird, but the break with the prior trajectory was sharp.

And that is that Democrats have had a really great past month or so.

Thanks, I think, to three equally important categories of action.

One, they broke out of their legislative inertia to pass a bunch of bills, most notably

the Inflation Reduction Act, which has really just built back better reduced to a few

core elements.

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