Democrats Can’t Fix What’s Wrong with Joe Biden

O ver at Politico, Jonathan Lemire offers his readers a hallucinatory missive, ordered direct from an alternate universe. It’s a good example of the sort of reported essay that begins to crop up ineluctably whenever it dawns upon the D.C. press corps that its personal hopes for the incumbent Democratic president are likely to be dashed. The problem with this president, Lemire suggests throughout, is not that he has attempted to govern in a manner unwarranted by his support in Congress and his popularity in the country at large, but that the “bygone era of D.C. may, indeed, be gone,” and that the White House is only just starting to recognize it. The solution? Going forward, Biden must be “less scripted and more on the offensive.” Out in the distance, one can hear Republican ad-makers popping the champagne.

The assumptions that undergird Lemire’s report should be depressingly familiar to anyone who follows American politics. They are, in no particular order: that Democratic presidents should get whatever they want, and that if they don’t, something is broken; that the Republican and Democratic parties secretly agree on everything, but, for some reason, keep failing to put their agreement into action in the legislature; and that all Democratic presidents are kind, reserved, bipartisan, avuncular figures who, having lived unblemished lives of purity and goodwill, eventually become shocked by the coarseness and misanthropy of their opponents. “Biden,” Lemire reports, “has taken to telling aides that he no longer recognizes the GOP, which he now views as an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.” Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one before.

The root complaint that Lemire’s piece attempts to launder is that President Biden has gotten less of what he wanted than he expected to get. To which one might reasonably ask, “So what?” The Senate is split 50–50. The Democrats enjoy a razor-thin majority in the House. The president is unusually unpopular. And, on policy and much else, the country remains starkly divided. From the day Biden took office, the prospects for his agenda were dim, and since that day, things have proceeded pretty much as one might have expected. Lemire complains that the Biden administration has “produced some notable legislative successes,” but that “it’s also been colored by a fair dose of in-your-face GOP obstructionism.” Which . . . well, yeah. In normal-people speak, this dull fact would be rendered as, “Sometimes, the two parties have come to a deal, and sometimes they have not.” Angered by this, “some in Biden’s orbit” have “been urging a far more aggressive response,” according to Lemire. But one must ask: A “more aggressive response” to what, exactly? To the existence of separation of powers? To the 2020 election, which yielded a divided Senate? To the election of Joe Manchin?

Lemire’s implicit answer is: to the GOP, which is being unreasonable. And yet, here, his concessions are instructive. Lemire notes that “infrastructure spending — which enjoyed broad support among voters of all ideologies — was one of only a few areas where Republicans were willing to go to work with the White House, the others including legislation to enhance U.S. competitiveness towards China and a largely unified front against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.” But, again, this is exactly what one would have expected from a divided Congress. The infrastructure bill garnered 69 votes in the Senate because its provisions had wide appeal. The same is true of Biden’s China policy, and of his stance toward Ukraine. It is not true of the rest of his agenda, most of which has failed not only because Republicans have refused to acquiesce to it, but because members of Biden’s own party have joined them in saying no.

Putting meat on the bone, Lemire laments that “the White House tried with no avail to win Republican support for its $1.9 trillion March 2021 Covid-relief bill but didn’t give up its efforts.” Clearly, though, Republicans were correct to oppose that bill, which was passed just seven weeks into Biden’s presidency, and which has proven to be a monumental disaster for the United States and a generational catastrophe for the Democratic Party. Just this week, Morgan Stanley directly blamed that law for America’s inflation crisis. The firm’s analysts argued that contemporary inflation levels are “due to the excessive fiscal stimulus provided during the pandemic, particularly the last $1.9T package at the end of March 2021 just as the economy was already emerging from the lockdowns. In our view, this was what turbocharged consumption and drove inflation to 40-year highs.” Surely, it can’t be the case that the Republicans are at fault for having refused to tie themselves to this anvil.

Or can it? I ask because throughout Lemire’s piece there is a pervasive implication that bipartisanship is a good in and of itself, and that Republicans are abjuring it once again out of obstinacy, extremism, and spite. To bolster this insinuation, Lemire quotes Biden’s 2020 prediction that “the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House . . . you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” and compares it to Barack Obama’s equally fantastical 2012 prediction that “the GOP’s ‘fever’ of opposition would ‘break’ after his 2012 reelection.” “Both men,” Lemire concludes with a sigh, “were wrong.”

Of course they were “wrong.” Their underlying hypothesis was nonsense. Time and time again, the Democratic Party has promised aloud that, in a few years’ time, the Republican Party will either cease to exist completely or will become an anodyne rubber-stamp. And time and time again, the press has repeated this as if it were serious analysis. There was never a good reason to believe that the election of 2012 — or the election of 2020, or the election of any year — would sweep away the Democratic Party’s institutional opponents. There was never a good reason to believe that the Republican Party’s longstanding political objectives would evaporate when Trump lost his reelection bid. There was never a good reason to believe that Republicans in Congress would simply give up their power once Barack Obama had won reelection. That Biden and Obama seem to have believed otherwise says less about the nature of the Republican Party than it does about the Democrats’ remarkable capacity for totalitarian self-delusion.

Were he more curious, Lemire might have chosen to investigate that self-delusion. But alas, he is not curious, as is confirmed by his having written with a straight face that Joe Biden — the man infamous for “put y’all back in chains” and the Clarence Thomas hearing and the 2012 vice-presidential debate and “Bull Connor” and “terrorists” — is pining for the days of the “Senate collegiality” that “the modern day GOP” has supposedly killed. It may suit the Democratic Party to pretend that Biden came into office as an elbow-less Santa Claus who couldn’t wait for poker night with John Cornyn, but no respectable journalist should be playing along. Before he was even sworn in, Biden backed the abolition of the filibuster that he’d spent 50 years defending, hinted that he’d be open to destroying the Supreme Court, and began muttering wildly about using the Senate’s reconciliation rules to pass an unsolicited spending package that would have made the tab for World War II look like dinner at Denny’s. Simply put, Lemire has missed the story — which is not about bygone eras or Republican intransigence or a dearth of elbows, but about Biden himself, who, no matter his means, chooses the wrong ends as a matter of unlovely routine.