The Biden approach is working
in some ways better than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I would have been surprised, but that’s what happened.
After Biden was elected, the two-track pattern was still going strong. The circus realm gave us the horror of Jan. 6. But the dull, governing part of America carried on. For example, the Senate confirmed Biden’s Cabinet picks in largely bipartisan fashion.
Biden’s legislative strategy owes something to each side of the Democratic Party. He wants to ram through a lot on partyline votes using reconciliation. But he also insists on a bipartisan approach whenever possible. Over the past few months, the bipartisan track has been moving faster than the partisan track.
Republicans and Democrats have been involved in a complex set of negotiations about infrastructure spending. It has been messy and complicated, the way politics always is, but the two sides have worked together productively.
“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” Mitt Romney told The Washington Post. “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.” When the Senate advanced the roughly $1 trillion measure by a vote of 67-32, that was a sign that experienced politicians can, as Biden suggested, make the system work.
The Biden administration has moved to separate government from the culture wars. It has shifted power away from the Green New Deal and Freedom Caucus show horses and lodged it with the congressional workhorses — people such as Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Mark Warner, who are in no danger of becoming social media stars.
The moderates are suddenly in strong shape. The progressives say they won’t support this Biden infrastructure bill unless it is passed simultaneously with a larger spending bill. But if the Democrats can’t agree on that larger bill, will progressives really sink their president’s infrastructure initiative? In the negotiations over the larger bill, the moderates have most of the power because they are the ones whose seats are at risk.
We have come a long way since the AOC glory days of 2019. Biden won the presidential nomination, not Bernie Sanders. Progressive excesses such as “defund the police” cost Democrats dearly down-ballot. Over the past months, there have been primary contests between regular Democrats and progressives, and party regulars have won all of them.
As former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel notes, the problem with the progressive base mobilization strategy is that progressives think they’re the base. But a faction that keeps losing primaries can’t be the base. Joe Biden is the base. And Biden and the 91% of Democrats who view him favorably want to make the system work. American politics is in god-awful shape, but we’re seeing a reasonably successful attempt to build it back better.