President Joe Biden and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox disagree on many issues but they were united Saturday in calling for less bitterness in politics and more bipartisanship.
“Politics has gotten too personally bitter,” said Biden, who has practiced politics since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. “It’s just not like it was.” The Democratic president commented while delivering a toast to the nation’s governors and their spouses at a black-tie White House dinner in their honor.
Biden said what makes him “feel good” about hosting the governors is “we have a tradition of doing things together. We fight like hell, we make sure that we get our points across. At the end of the day, we know who we work for. The objective is to get things done.”
Things have gotten bitter, but you can’t have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don’t engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it’s a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don’t have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can’t deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.
Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they’re kind of self-sabotaging here. All they’re accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?
Biden just doesn’t understand what life is like for lots of Americans.
A shit ton of us have to live in the red states these Republican governors run, and we know they’re terrible people who will never compromise.
The American president needs to have a realistic worldview, not stuck in a reality that stopped existing literal generations ago.
Like, he’s reminiscing about Nixon and Regean’s heydays, what rational person thinks things were great back then?
I’m actually a fan of all this division because I think it’s necessary and productive to progressing our nation forward. I think for decades, since our founding really, conservative puritanism has controlled the narrative. Now truth is finally separating itself from ignorance. What was once muddied waters is conservatism losing its grip on reality and desperately lashing out like a rat backed into a corner.
The only thing the Republican party has left is being the Anti-Dem. Doesn’t matter how moral or truthful Democratic policy is, they must oppose it for they have nothing left.
A cornered animal is dangerous, and will do anything it deems necessary to ensure its own survival. I don’t disagree with you here, but there will come a reckoning about this and it won’t be a fun time for most people. It may even come as early as the upcoming 2024 election.
Oh no doubt it’s still dangerous, but a feral animal still needs to get removed from the premises regardless. Change is always hard. If you haven’t read The Shock Doctrine, I highly recommend. Though it tends to focus on crises that lead to generally worsening conditions. In this instance, I think the most damaging part has been in the past when conservatives just got everything they want and had such a strangehold on the nation and Both Sides / False Equivalence axis ran rampant. It was jut 10-15-years-ago that these were not household phrases.
Biden said he remembered when lawmakers would argue by day and break bread together at night. He is currently embroiled in stalemates with the Republican-controlled House over immigration policy, government funding and aid for Ukraine and Israel.
Biden doesn’t care about what they’re doing to American citizens, he just misses the good ole days where he would fight against school desegregation and then laugh over drinks with Strom Thurmmond afterwards.
The good old days are more disgusting in a way.
For instance, lgbt+ stuff is a moral issue. I’ll argue in favor of their rights all day. I will not sit down with the people I’m arguing with and break bread. The opposition wants people dead for existing. He’s literally saying he doesn’t actually care about the issues.
This used to be a game to him, but now the stakes are getting real.
The stakes have always been real. What a window lickerYep.
Think about how fucked those “good ole days” he wants to go back to were for anyone who wasn’t a wealthy white straight man.
For Biden they were great, and I don’t doubt he truly wants to go back to those days and remembers them fondly for personal reasons.
Fortunately lots of people born after 1960 recognize how fucked up those days were for lots of people.
Unfortunately both candidates in this election were born in the 1940s and for some fucked up reason we’re not supposed to talk about all the reasons that’s horrible for America.
Yeah, more collaboration with a party of fascists, anarcho-capitalists and people bizarrely combining the two is sure to improve life for regular people!
It’s no exaggeration that the Dem leadership is so ridiculously obsessed with “bipartisanship” that they’d literally have collaborated with the German nazi party if they replaced the Republicans.
Biden might SAY “it’s just not how it was” but he and the rest of the Dem leadership sure as hell ACT like it’s 1992.
