Joe Biden's Frantic Defense of the Status Quo [View all]

[BeckyDem]

The former vice president's unending promises of reconciling with Republicans may be designed to forestall a future of radical demands.

By Osita Nwanevu

November 18, 2019

With the entry of former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick into the Democratic primary race, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg exploring a bid, and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, rising in the polls, Joe Biden will likely spend the next few weeks reemphasizing the case for his presidency to party moderates. Part of that case will include a claim he has made repeatedly since he entered the race—that under a Biden administration, the Republican Party, freed from the pressures and influences of the Trump presidency, would be more willing to work with Democrats to pass major legislation, including new health care and climate bills.

One of the oddest renditions yet of this argument came last week during a CNN town hall. “It has become so, so difficult for Republicans to be able to—unless they have real courage—stand up and take on the president even if they think he should be taken on, because he has such vitriol,” he told the audience. “He has no empathy. And what happens is he controls now somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of the electorate, which is the bulk of the Republican Party. I’ll give you an example.”

Biden’s example was a recounting of the Merrick Garland nomination, which Senate Republicans—during the Obama administration, before Trump—blocked. He described confronting those senators. “I said, ‘Do you realize what you’re doing to the Constitution?’ They said, ‘We know, Joe. But here’s the deal. I’m in a state where if the Koch brothers drop in $10, $12 million dollars, I will lose a primary.’” He closed this tangent with a jab at Trump. “The politics has gotten just so out of whack,” he said. “But it’s going to come back and whack this guy.”

Over the course of his campaign, two explanations for Biden’s promise of a political reconciliation to come have been offered. One is that Biden genuinely believes that the Republican Party will change after Trump leaves office. In this view, Biden’s own personal history and career—the relationships he built with segregationists in the Senate, his work on now-reviled bipartisan legislation like the 1994 crime bill—have inspired within him a deep and abiding faith in the possibility of political comity and co-governance with the right. This faith persists against all contrary evidence provided not only by the Trump era—in which the party has, among other things, abetted Trump’s attacks on Biden’s own son—but also by the Obama era, during which Biden saw, as his own recollection of the Garland saga illustrates, the GOP both frustrate Democrats with strategic intransigence and lean in to a conspiratorial racism that presaged Trump and will endure after his presidency.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155749/joe-bidens-frantic-defense-status-quo

Warren 2020!!