Chris Coons is roughly my age. He was born in ’63. He shouldn’t be in lockstep with the oldsheads, but he is. Senator Elect, Blunt Rochester was born in ’62. She is also old beyond her years.
The biggest divide in the Democratic Party at this point is not liberals versus moderates. It’s age. It’s those who were in Congress before about 2004 and those after that. Most of those long veterans still have dreams of hanging out in the Senate locker room while a naked Jennings Randolph told jokes, a la Biden. They long for an ideal of bipartisanship that simply doesn’t exist. And they are not particularly concerned with economic justice questions. Most of those after that time may have different political views, but they usually fundamentally get that Republicans can’t be dealt with like rational humans. But the leadership very much is in that older generation. So such a scenario was going to be tough to resist. Biden himself has defended the debt ceiling. A rational party would have eliminated the debt ceiling entirely when it had the trifecta, but there are just too many olds in the party for that. So this is where we are.