Political capital doesn’t solve OR deplete.

As David Roberts of Vox observes: In 2009, Obama and his aides made the mistake of thinking that their major initiatives had to be rolled out one at a time in sequence, because he had a finite store of “political capital” that had to be spent carefully. But political capital is not something that exists apart from any particular issue; it isn’t a special sauce that has to be poured on a policy in order to make it palatable.

And with the parties as polarized and unified as they are, political capital has become all but meaningless. There may have been a time when a popular president possessed so much capital that a senator from the opposition party would feel compelled to support him on part of that president’s agenda, but that time is long gone. There is no account Biden can draw on to turn Republican “no” votes into “yes.”

So setting up a series of high-profile policy battles may be the opposite of what Biden should do. The unfortunate fact is that he may not have the opportunity to do much in the way of big legislation on health care or climate change or anything else, and if he has only executive power to work with, it makes it all the more urgent to move quickly.

Which means getting staff in place immediately and then unleashing them. The Revolving Door Project argues that Biden should give as much authority as possible to the agencies to let them dismantle their particular corners of the Trump legacy on their own, because the task “simply will not happen if approached sequentially or micromanaged” by a White House staff with limited bandwidth.

That means moving on every policy area all at once. There’s nothing to be gained by putting off any part of Biden’s agenda. Whatever he can do given the limits of his power, he should do as soon as possible, in a flood of policymaking.

Even if Democrats win both Georgia races and control the Senate, Biden should acknowledge that he likely has two years until the 2022 midterm elections to pass whatever legislation he can. Not only will Democrats probably lose one or both houses in the inevitable backlash (as happens to most presidents in their first midterm), the only possible chance at forestalling that result is to get results, as many as possible, that he can show the voters.

Republicans will complain that Biden is being partisan, uncompromising, taking a “my way or the highway” approach. It will be a strategy to convince everyone of the lie that Biden and Democrats might be able to find some way of winning them over, when in fact they’ll be implementing a strategy of total opposition.

If Biden follows them on that fruitless quest, he’ll be running in circles while crucial time passes and nothing gets done. The only option for him is to decide not to care about Republican whining and do what he got elected to do with all haste. The alternative is failure.