House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has been invoking a new rebuttal as opponents try to pin the socialism label to the Democratic agenda.
“We believe in a country where you have a strong floor and no ceiling. That’s what we believe in as Democrats,” Jeffries told reporters leaving his Nov. 20 news conference.
The highest-ranking Democrat in the House went on to explain the concept as, “When you work hard and play by the rules in the United States of America, there should be no ceiling to the success that you can achieve.”
The idea posits that everyone should have the government’s support to pursue the American Dream without limiting the success available to those already at the top.
It’s the type of motto usually crafted after political consultants spent countless hours poring over polling, focus groups and data analytics. Instead, Jeffries’ new line comes from the title of a book released this month and written by a Manhattan venture capitalist who isn’t particularly close to Jeffries.
“We have no real purpose, no great shared goal. We feel we’re adrift because we are,” author Oliver Libby writes in the introduction of “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.”
Libby’s title provides a new, four-word rejoinder to the decade-old Make America Great Again ethos. The book offers more than 50 mostly centrist proposals, although some veer into more conservative or progressive territory.
The nation’s biggest problem is an economic malaise that has deflated the shared sense of American vision, Libby, 44, said in an interview Tuesday.
“There’s something unifying when we are asked to do something together, and building a strong floor, no ceiling is just like that. And we haven’t been asked to do something great in forever,” he said.
Libby has been a longtime generous donor to Democratic campaigns, but he is not a close ally of Jeffries.
Libby is friends with Max Rose, a former Democratic congressman from New York, who liked the early drafts of the book and encouraged Libby to send a copy to Jeffries. Libby said he saw Jeffries at a couple of political events and nudged him about the book, but months passed without any response.
Then one day, aides called to notify him that Jeffries would write a blurb calling it a “bold and comprehensive” plan. In mid-August, Libby turned up the volume on his TV when he saw Jeffries on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” getting peppered with questions about socialism.
“I’ll tell you what we stand for,” Jeffries interjected, reciting Libby’s message. “It’s pretty clear. As Democrats, we believe in a strong floor and no ceiling. In America, you work hard, you play by the rules, you should be able to live the good life.”
Jeffries turned to the 90th anniversary of the creation of Social Security, what he considers the foundation for the “strong floor.”
“I about fell out of my chair,” Libby said. “I mean, I had no warning he was going to do that.”
Since then, Jeffries has turned to this framing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” and in the give-and-take with reporters in the Capitol.
Others have joined in as well, including Rep. Eric Swalwell (D), who recently announcedthat he is joining the crowded race for California governor.
Libby considers himself a lifelong Democrat, but he wrote the book as a rallying cry for centrists in both major parties. His first political donation went to the presidential campaign of former Republican New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose firm, Giuliani Partners, provided Libby his first full-time job after he graduated from Harvard University in 2003.
While at Harvard, he worked on a college program for the CIA that he wouldn’t elaborate on. In 2009, he founded H/L Ventures with Eric Hatzimemos, a onetime counsel to Giuliani. The company focuses on investing in start-up companies that they say “add value to society.”
“People who are in the center have no political home. They are adrift. There is no brand. There is no slogan,” Libby said in the interview.
The title emerged from a LinkedIn essay he posted in 2018, prompting friends to encourage him to keep writing about it. He began sketching out the book during the pandemic.
While it was written for those across the political spectrum, it lands at a time when Republicans are oozing confidence after President Donald Trump’s win last year, and Democrats are adrift as they search for a new rallying cry to appeal to voters.
Libby’s proposals read like a collection of ideas that could have come from the Bipartisan Policy Center, Center for American Progress or American Enterprise Institute, and some sound like ideas Republicans have already promoted. Some of those could spark a liberal backlash if Jeffries were to embrace them.
Among them: America needs to build more private-public partnerships to rebuild our infrastructure grids. The federal government should create a chief operating officer and “Fair Rules Commission” to cut red tape.
Everyone should be afforded tax credits to get more preventative health care. Local governments need to be tough on crime. The federal government needs to maintain a secure southern border.
His most far-reaching ideas on the left include public financing of elections and, eventually, some version of a “universal basic income” for workers who get displaced by the AI and robotics revolutions.
His conservative ideas include granting longer patents to drug and biotechnology companies that would generate them more profits and thus incentivize more innovation. And Libby’s “no ceiling” concept is a direct contrast to far-left Democrats who have been attacking the billionaire technology CEOs who have largely fallen in line supporting Trump.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with having a billion dollars. In fact, most people who earned a billion dollars did so by creating something that a lot of people wanted to pay for — I don’t know a more American idea than that,” he said in the interview.
His family roots to Jewish families in Spain and France go back hundreds of years. He keeps a Western Union telegram from 1940 urging his family to flee France as World War II spread. It was sent by Eugene Meyer, the former Federal Reserve chair who bought The Washington Post in 1933. Meyer worked with the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, to secure their safe passage.
Libby’s grandfather, Baruj Benacerraf, shared a Nobel Prize in 1980 for his work on gene cells in immunology. His mother, Beryl Benacerraf, was a pioneer in using ultrasound in pregnancies at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, where his father, Peter Libby, was the chief of cardiology.
Oliver Libby decided at a young age that he wanted to pursue public service, prompting his early interest in the CIA. He was on campus at Harvard when the 2001 terrorist attacks happened, but he grew disillusioned with the domestic response that urged Americans to go shopping to support the economy.
“We were asked to hit the mall and swipe our credit cards. There was little sacrifice. The average citizen was not contributing to — or really connected to — the war effort,” he wrote in the book.
A talk with his grandfather sent him into the private sector, to New York, making him plenty of money, but the itch toward government remains strong. He acknowledges in his book that he will run for office someday.
The question for Libby, and Democrats like Jeffries and Swalwell, is whether the “strong floor, no ceiling” movement is big enough to be a modern version of the New Deal or Great Society.
Or if it’s just a branding exercise.
“The best policy in America is both effective and well-branded,” he said, criticizing the Biden administration’s struggles with promoting legislative successes like the CHIPS and Science Act.
While promoting the book, Libby has regularly asked audiences to describe the four words that define the center-left movement today. He usually gets shrugs for responses.
“The American people know precisely what Donald Trump says. And in Make America Great Again, they can see what they want to see in the country,” he said.
Jeffries likes this framework to punch back at suggestions that Democrats have no message or agenda.
In his exchange with reporters last week, he touted 90 years of domestic policy that Democrats have pushed, including Social Security, the GI Bill and the Affordable Care Act.
“By the way, all things brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Democratic Party. Strong floor, no ceiling. That’s what we believe in. Those are Democratic values. Those are American values,” Jeffries said.
Libby couldn’t agree more.
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