Did everyone simply assume that Trump was lying when he called for unity? Possibly. Bash certainly wasn’t wrong when she said that “he's not that person, and he's never going to be that person.” Even so, it’s a call that he publicly made, just as many other candidates and politicians have done over the course of years. Biden’s calls for unity don’t justify holding him to a different standard than Trump. And the real source of the unity problem dates back to before either man stepped into the Oval Office.
The Obama presidency was marked by historic and strategic obstruction by Republicans, but this was treated as a failure of leadership on Obama’s part.
In 2009, just days after Obama’s inauguration, NBC News’ Chuck Todd asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if the new president would veto his own economic stimulus bill if it didn’t have Republican support. Keeping in mind that Obama took office at a time of economic catastrophe, when the country was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, it seems downright silly that he would veto his own emergency legislation.
Zero House Republicans voted for the bill, and just three Senate Republicans voted for it. Does that make it bad legislation? No, of course not. The goal of the bill was to catch an economy in free fall and turn it around. On that front, it was a major success, as Obama left office with a net gain of more than 11.5 million jobs. By comparison, Trump lost nearly 4 million jobs during his term.
Bipartisanship for the sake of projecting unity is about politics, not governance. When Todd asked whether Obama would veto his own legislation, that’s precisely what he was concerning himself with: politics. As we would come to learn as Obama’s first term went on, the lack of Republican buy-in for Obama’s policies was also about politics, not policy disagreements.
“We’re going to do everything -- and I mean everything we can do -- to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can,” then-Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) said of Obama’s agenda ahead of the 2010 midterms.
Around that same time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made the case that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
This was a far cry from George W. Bush’s administration, in which Democrats in Congress could be counted on to work with the administration in good faith on bills where there was common ground. This was a standard and completely unremarkable approach to governing, and it changed only after Obama took office. Luckily for Republicans, the press wouldn’t hold their obstruction against them.
In 2010, The New York Times hammered Obama following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The issue wasn’t with the merits of the new health care law, but with the vote totals. After months of negotiations, amendments, and attempts to woo Republican legislators, the bill passed through Congress without a single Republican vote.
“But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good,” wrote the Times’ David Sanger. “Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a ‘postpartisan’ Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.”
It’s true that Obama did campaign in 2008 on trying to bridge partisan divides. He cited then-Sen. Biden’s ability to work across the aisle as a selling point for picking him as his running mate. “I know [Biden will] be able to help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people,” he said.
But it takes a willing partner to accomplish anything of note. Obama did not have that willing partner, and Biden won’t, either. So long as the media frame Republican obstruction as a Democratic failure, there’s no political incentive for Republicans to work with Democrats, even when they share goals.
The press went easy on Trump and didn’t seem to hold his unwillingness to work with Democrats against him. That wasn’t the case with Obama, and it hasn’t been the case with Biden.
Biden took office amid the biggest economic crisis to greet a new president since -- well, since the last time a Democratic president was voted into power. Just as in 2009, when Obama worked to pass a stimulus bill in response to the economic calamity, Biden was tasked with the immediate need to sign a COVID-19 relief bill into law. And just as in 2009, the media is treating a lack of Republican votes as a presidential failure.
Biden met with Republican senators earlier this month in an attempt to find common ground, but they weren’t able to come to a compromise between the $1.9 trillion package backed by Democrats and the $618 billion bill proposed by the Republicans, forcing the president to rely on a bill passed via the filibuster-immune reconciliation process in the Senate. Reuters called the bill’s passage “an early test of Biden’s promise to work to bridge the partisan divide in Washington.”
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