The fanciful fever of bipartisanship is finally breaking within the White House.
"I never expected the ultra-MAGA Republicans who seem to control the Republican Party now, to have been able to control the Republican Party," President Joe Biden told reporters last week following an address on inflation. "I never anticipated that happening."
Biden seemed almost pained to admit it, pausing for a moment to think "carefully" through exactly how he wanted to make the statement.
The remark flies in the face of candidate Joe Biden's assertion on the campaign trail that simply ousting Donald Trump from office would "fundamentally change things" for the Republican Party.
Christina Reynolds, VP of Communications at EMILY's List, talks about spending $150 million to center abortion rights in this November’s elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast
“Not a joke,” Biden said at a 2020 New Hampshire campaign stop. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”
What made Biden's comment particularly notable at the time was the fact that, for eight years, he had served as right-hand man to another Democratic president who had tried and failed to make bridging political divides the central tenet of his presidency, Barack Obama. And that effort in futility transpired even before Trump remade the GOP in his image.
Two of President Obama's biggest legislative victories during his two terms in office—the nearly $800 billion stimulus plan and the Affordable Care Act—attracted a grand total of three GOP votes in all of Congress. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania helped push through the stimulus package in February 2009, while House Republicans entirely rejected it. But after many precious months of negotiating, not a single Republican voted to give health care to some 20 million more Americans—Obama's signature achievement.
But on the campaign trail, Biden described a much rosier scenario.
"We need someone with proven ability to bring people together and do the hard work of getting legislation passed," Biden said at a Dec. 2019 rally in San Antonio, Texas. "I have done that before — finding the Republican votes for the Recovery Act, Obamacare, helping keep us from falling into a Great Depression."
That narrative was always a stretch. But once Biden was in the White House, according to new reporting in Politico, some of his top aides counseled that passing bipartisan legislation would redound to Biden and Democrats' favor.
“President Biden ran on the message that we need to bring people together to meet the challenges facing our country,” White House senior adviser Mike Donilon wrote in a strategy memo last summer, as the Senate reached a deal on the bipartisan infrastructure passage. “And the American people embraced that message. While a lot of pundits have doubted bipartisanship was even possible, the American people have been very clear it is what they want.”
In fact, President Biden looked like a kid in a candy store last June when he announced, "We have a deal," flanked by a group of Democratic and Republican senators in front of the White House.
Getting that "deal" through both chambers ultimately ate up the bulk of the rest of the calendar year while Biden's signature Build Back Better bill languished. And once again, key Democratic constituencies such as young voters and people of color watched the Democratic president they helped elect ignore their top priorities, such as voting rights and climate change.
That disconnect is exactly what led to what President Obama famously called the "shellacking" Democrats took in the 2010 midterms during his first term. Young voters along with activists from the LGBTQ, immigration, and climate change movements watched their priority legislation wither on the vine even after Democrats finally pushed through Obamacare in March 2010 on a party-line vote.
But here is where the narrative of 2022 could part ways with that of 2010: Democrats, even in the White House, appear to understand the enthusiasm gap is working against them. The bipartisan infrastructure deal that Biden rejoiced in hasn't saved his approval rating from falling to Trump-era lows. Democrats also passed a historic COVID-19 stimulus package—entirely on party lines—that jolted the economy awake, padded Americans' pocketbooks, and facilitated a wildly successful vaccination rollout among Americans who wanted the protections.
Still, none of those policy wins, which have benefitted nearly every American to some extent, seem to be resonating in an environment where inflation has hit historic highs and the toxic politics that defined the Trump era haven't really receded.
Trump wasn't a fluke. And Biden's admission that Trump's movement of "MAGA Republicans" now owns the GOP is an acknowledgement that the political framework he championed on the 2020 campaign trail is failing to rise to this political moment.
Perhaps, the president's revelation has come with just enough time left before November to help turn the tide on what was shaping up to be a Republican rout.
The Supreme Court seems poised to inject as explosive an issue possible into the midterm—potential rocket fuel for Democratic candidates hoping to light a fire under their base.
At the same time, the White House is working to close the enthusiasm gap with appeals to both swing voters and the Democratic base.
Biden used a speech last week to frame the choice for voters in November, blasting the GOP plan put forward by Sen. Rick Scott of Florida to raise taxes on some 75 million working families while sunsetting Medicare and Social Security, a longtime GOP priority momentarily sidelined by Trump. The speech marked one of the few times President Biden has picked a policy fight with Republicans, and it drew the ire of Scott, the Senate GOP campaign chair, who responded with a vitriolic personal attack calling Biden "unwell" and "incoherent."
Biden's broadside on Scott's 11-point plan clearly got under the Senator's skin and, frankly, Democrats should take that as an invitation to keep hammering it home. It's still the GOP's de facto vision, since Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to articulate any set of priorities.
The White House is also signaling plans to move forward on some type of student debt cancellation before loan payments are set to resume this fall.
"Forgiveness of $10,000 per borrower -- the floor of what Biden is considering -- would clear loans for 15 million of 46 million borrowers," Bloomberg News reported last week.
Whatever shape that debt relief takes, it will provide at least some meaningful relief to many Democratic voters who consider it both a top priority and a campaign promise.
The very basic realization that Democrats have got to do more than simply pass a couple more bills is a critical step toward blunting historical midterm trends for a party with control of the White House.
These are ahistorical times. The Jan. 6 insurrection, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the impending doom of reproductive rights in the next couple months all serve as reminders that which party controls Congress is indeed existential to both public health and the health of our democracy.
The fact that Republicans are fielding a team of MAGA radicals across the country should serve to buttress that case—but only if Democrats make it.
