The House Democratic leadership in Washington seems to lack the good sense to accept victory in the first game of a doubleheader.
It has been insisting on declining to enter that victory in the standings unless it also wins the second game. For House Democrats, it's been sweep or bust.
That's no way to win a pennant or American voters' hearts.
Much of this imbroglio depends on what the meaning of "as soon as possible" is.
On Aug. 11, the U.S. Senate, by the votes of 50 Democrats and 19 Republicans, passed a popular $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, about half of it in the form of activated spending for previously planned projects and half of it for new projects. The action was widely hailed as the most significant bipartisan congressional action in years.
The bill would improve roads, bridges, transportation centers and broadband as well as pay for electric-car charging stations and protections against flooding and fires. Jobs would be created. The national ride would get smoother.
President Joe Biden, who had promised bipartisanship and worked hard for the bill, was happy.
His Twitter account declared that day: "Big news, folks. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has officially passed the Senate. I hope Congress will send it to my desk as soon as possible so we can continue our work of building back better."
The House of Representatives now has the bill. Passage "as soon as possible" could be taken to mean right away.
But the White House now says it's fully aligned with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's position--driven by her left flank--that the Biden spending agenda will advance only in two measures bound on the same track.
Pelosi has linked the infrastructure bill to a budget resolution providing a key procedural step establishing a broad outline for a $3.5 trillion social spending bill to be filled out with details later. She has been wanting to wait for the Senate to pass an actual $3.5 trillion bill with the blanks filled in, then proceed together on both bills--infrastructure and social spending--only after both are finished products on file at her end of the Capitol.
All of that might not happen for months, if ever, because Democrats may not be able to agree on how to fill in the blanks for $3.5 trillion on such generational advancements as Medicare dental coverage, paid medical leave, two years of free community college, and climate-change protections.
Two of the Democrats' 50 senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, say they can't go as large as $3.5 trillion. House progressives said they can accept nothing smaller.
Democratic moderates say the party will risk the midterms and the presidency if they overplay their hand with too much spending. Progressive Democrats counter that everyone knows you can only get done what you want on those occasions when you have the presidency and both legislative chambers, which means shooting the moon now and defending it--indeed bragging about it--in the looming midterm campaign.
Nine moderate House Democrats who are members of a Problem Solvers Caucus declared that they would not vote for the broad budget reconciliation outline unless the infrastructure bill was passed first and sent to the president with the speed he requested on Twitter.
The current Democratic margin in the House is five. Nine defections kill a deal. While there are several Republican votes for $1.2 trillion on infrastructure as a stand-alone measure, there are none for $3.5 trillion on social spending.
These nine moderate House Democrats signed an op-ed guest column in The Washington Post on Sunday that said the country needed "shovels in the ground" now on infrastructure. It argued that the Democratic leadership needed to accept a great victory at hand rather than risk the $1.2 trillion deal growing stale in the way that deals sometimes go when they sit around idle.
Liberal groups want to use the popular infrastructure bill to leverage the less-popular social spending, which they call "transformative," not that mixed-messaging voters in November mandated any such transformation. These liberal groups have run ads in the districts of the nine moderates accusing them of endangering the entire Biden agenda, even though they're doing precisely that themselves.
Typically, party pressure was bought to bear Tuesday for a compromise seeking to save all faces. Moderates got a date-certain vote on the infrastructure bill preceding the new federal fiscal year starting Oct. 1, regardless of the status of the social-spending bill. The date is Sept. 27. But they agreed to vote Tuesday to approve the budget resolution providing the key procedural step for later consideration of the bigger--and still blank--bill.
Here's what Democrats ought to have done, or ought to do now, requiring simplicity and logic that is rare in modern American politics and rarer still among pragmatism-challenged Democrats: They should accept the popular win they have. Then they should move entirely separately to other things.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.