Are Biden and Democrats in the process of redefining bipartisanship?

Are Biden and Democrats in the process of redefining bipartisanship?

Opinion by Greg Sargent

March 10, 2021 at 6:20 a.m. GMT+9

President Biden at the White House on Tuesday. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

A new poll from Pew Research confirms yet again that there’s broad public support for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue package: Seventy percent of Americans favor it, while only 28 percent are opposed.

Notably, the poll also finds that a total of 66 percent say its proposed spending is either about right (41 percent) or too little (25 percent). By contrast, only 33 percent say it’s too high.

That suggests support isn’t merely driven by enthusiasm for getting big stimulus checks and faster vaccinations — which obviously will be popular, since people like money and don’t like living under pandemic conditions. More to the point, a large majority of Americans support responding to the crises facing the country with enormous public expenditures.

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All of which raises a question: Is the wide public support for the proposal — and, apparently, for its ambitiously progressive ideological underpinnings — also allowing Biden and Democrats to shift public attitudes away from a romanticized view of how the parties are supposed to work together?

Consider this question, buried in the Pew poll:

Thinking about the proposed coronavirus economic aid package, do you think the Biden administration is making a good faith effort to work with Republican Congressional leaders?

A solid 57 percent say the administration is making a good-faith effort to work with Republicans, while only 40 percent say it is not.

Now consider this question:

Thinking about the proposed coronavirus economic aid package, do you think the Republican congressional leaders are making a good faith effort to work with the Biden administration?

Here again, a solid 55 percent say Republicans are not making a good-faith effort to work with the administration, while only 42 percent say they are.

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It’s not clear, of course, how much voters care about such matters, though they often claim to. It’s probable that they care far more about whether leaders deliver results than whether they try to work with the opposition.

But here’s one thing that is clear: If this poll is right, the public is broadly rejecting the official definition of bipartisanship that has seeped into so much mainstream news coverage of this debate.

Republicans spent weeks claiming that if Biden didn’t substantially scale down his agenda to win their support, it would amount to a betrayal of his promise to work with them and unify the country.

After trying to win over Republicans — but without wasting too much time doing so — Biden and Democrats went ahead with the package at pretty much its original scale. Versions have now passed the House and Senate with zero Republican support.

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While Biden did have to make compromises — the minimum-wage hike was lost, stimulus checks won’t get sent to some higher earners, and unemployment assistance was whittled down — those were largely to mollify moderate Democrats, not Republicans.

Nonetheless, even though Biden and Democrats are doing this all alone, a solid majority of Americans think Biden made a good-faith effort to work with Republicans, and don’t think the reverse is true.

The romanticized view of how the parties are supposed to work together is that each side offers a proposal, and after much debate and horse-trading, they meet somewhere in the middle. This is supposed to be inherently a good thing, showing the system working.

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It’s a fantasy, of course, one grounded in an utter refusal to acknowledge how the modern GOP approaches Democratic presidents. Unfortunately, this fantasy view is also animating defenses of the filibuster coming from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, but put that aside for now.

The key point is that here large majorities approve of the results even though that romanticized picture of the process didn’t happen — and large majorities are not blaming Biden for failing to magically make it come to pass.

Much press coverage has suggested that if Biden does not win over Republicans, he will have failed to fulfill his “unity” promise, as if the onus of manufacturing cross-party agreement rested only on him. This poll suggests broad public rejection of that idea: Majorities believe he did strive for bipartisanship.

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You might argue that majorities are saying Biden acted in good faith precisely because they approve of the policies that he’s effecting. But that’s exactly the point: Impressions of the results will inevitably color public conclusions about how the process was conducted.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that somewhere.

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