President Biden implored his fractured party Saturday to come together and pass his multi-trillion-dollar spending bills — assuring Democrats that his pricey agenda will “win the 21st century.”
“My message is simple: we need to stay together, and bound by the values that we hold as a party,” Biden said in a three-minute pre-recorded address released Saturday at the Democratic National Committee’s fall meeting.
“Because here’s the deal: we won 2020 as a unified party,” Biden said. “And we look to 2022, as we do that, we need to stay unified.”
Biden did not name Senate holdouts Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), whose resistance has stalled his $3.5 trillion social-spending package — or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who blasted the two in a fiery press conference this week that laid Democrats’ divisions bare.
But he promised the party faithful that his spending plans, if enacted, would be praised far into the future — even as some Dems fret that its high price tag and steep expansion of government could cost them their Congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections.
“If we deliver today across the board,” Biden vowed, “50 years from now people are going to look back and say this was the period, this was the moment, America won the 21st century.”