Biden’s Withering Olive Branch
The new
year will prove whether we have any decency left in us.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
The year will turn, Joe Biden will take
the oath of office, and we’ll heal.
That was the fundamental promise of his
campaign, no? That was the hope.
But I’m struggling mightily to hold on
to even a sliver of it.
Like President-elect Biden, I believe
in common ground, in comity, in identifying where we intersect rather than
where we diverge. I was drawn to him, as were a critical mass of other
Americans, because he represented the calm after the storm, the sense after the
sensation.
But is calm a mirage? Is normalcy
obsolete? In the many weeks since it became clear that he lost the election,
Donald Trump has successfully marketed an outrageous alternate reality, so that
70 percent of registered Republican voters, according to a Quinnipiac poll
this month, believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Trump has
taken his refusal to concede to historic, previously unthinkable lengths.
And an overwhelming majority of
Republican members of Congress have played along, actively or passively, many
of them knowing better, all of them traitors to democracy and profiles in
cowardice.
To this crew Biden is supposed to
extend an olive branch?
From this bunch he’s
expected to wring droplets of decency?
Wishing for that may be like looking
for leprechauns. The new year will let us know.
The current one, at long last ending,
just about finished us. America was a frayed tapestry in the grip of some
cosmic hands that kept pulling it apart, harder and harder. The most wickedly
divisive, wantonly self-serving president in the country’s modern history went
full-bore nihilist. A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that should have given us
shared purpose turned us against one another.
But that president is packing.
The advent of effective vaccines promises a far side
to all the death and fear. We have an opportunity to discover what measure of
cooperation, integrity and plain old practicality we have left in us.
That’s going to be the political story
of 2021, the one that overarches any specific confirmation hearing, any particular scandal, the fading thunder of Trump’s
henchmen and the cruel aftershocks of social lockdowns and economic slowdown.
We’ll either seize
this fresh chance — maybe our best chance — to get along, just a little,
and get something done. Or we’ll blow it.
We’ll either take baby steps back
toward a chapter of American government less savagely partisan than the past
few years — and decades — have been, or we’ll accept
polarization and paralysis as the country’s default setting for the foreseeable
future. The stakes feel exactly that big to me.
“I think it’s very hard to get back to
the way things were,” said Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Senate
Republican who voted to convict President Trump at the end of
his impeachment trial. We spoke the day after the electors in the Electoral
College formalized Biden’s victory.
One of the obstacles, Romney said, is a
media environment in which different Americans now consume entirely different
facts. “If you have 70 percent of Republicans thinking that Biden stole the
election, that’s a hard hole to dig out of,” he said.
But if any president can make headway
in this era of gall and grievance, it’s Biden. He was elected to soothe rather
than stir, plod rather than strut, and by all appearances so far, he
understands that.
Just look at his preternatural
reticence in the face of Trump’s and other Republicans’ postelection provocations.
Across much of November and December, reporters sought from Biden some howl of
anguish, some fiery denunciation, and got oratorical oatmeal instead. He murmured metronomically
that Republicans would eventually come around.
It was unsatisfying but right. What would be accomplished by screaming the
opposite?
Even when he finally took Trump and his
Republican enablers to task in a speech on Dec. 14, he did so with an appeal
for unity and a renewed pledge to work as hard for the Americans who hadn’t
voted for him as for the Americans who had. His recriminations were measured and
sandwiched between feel-good reflections on democracy.
Three days later,
when he and Jill Biden were interviewed by Stephen Colbert, he remained
impossibly placid and insistently positive as Colbert wondered about the
ferocity with which Republicans were going after Biden’s son, Hunter. “It is
what it is,” Biden said, assuring Colbert that no matter how unfair or
overzealous Republicans’ effort, he would always try to work with them when
Americans’ welfare was in the balance.
That’s not just public posturing. The
Washington Post reported that
in a recent meeting with supporters of his, he was upbeat about opportunities
for bipartisanship, telling them: “I may eat these words, but I predict to you:
As Donald Trump’s shadow fades away, you’re going to see an awful lot change.”
Jack Markell, the Democratic former
governor of Delaware, told me that Biden “has demonstrated an incredible amount
of maturity by taking this long game and not getting in any spats in the
meantime. His tone has been perfect, and that will serve him well.”
So will his 36 years in the Senate and
eight as vice president. He has dealt extensively with many powerful
Republicans in Congress, and they have dealt with him, enough to appreciate, at
least privately, that he’s neither an ideologue nor a grandstander.
“Republican senators from Mitch
McConnell on down know his intentions,” Pete Buttigieg, whose campaign for the
presidency emphasized the need to end the ceaseless warfare in Washington, told
me in an interview more than a week before he emerged as Biden’s nominee for transportation secretary.
“They know that he’s a good person. They know that he has good will.” Buttigieg
added that he wasn’t speaking “as a kind of partisan defender of Joe Biden” but
as someone familiar with what Republican lawmakers say about the
president-elect when they’re away from microphones and television cameras.
Obviously, Biden’s interactions with
McConnell will be shaped by the outcome of the two Senate runoffs in Georgia
and whether Democrats or Republicans control the chamber. Either way, though,
McConnell will play a major role in the fate of Biden’s agenda, and the faint,
flickering possibility that the two might not end up as mortal enemies locked
in perpetual combat was captured in the media’s fascination, following Election
Day, with whether they had begun talking.
It was as if all the political
journalists in Washington were packed onto some widow’s walk craning their necks for
the first sign of bipartisanship’s mast. There! On the horizon! An across-the-aisle
phone call!
“I feel like I’m on a
roller-coaster ride, running between hopeful and hopeless,” said Representative
Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat. We spoke just hours before the U.S. Supreme
Court rejected a lawsuit from her state’s Republican
attorney general that asked the justices to throw out the results in four
states, Texas not among them, that
voted for Biden. Seventeen other Republican state attorneys general
supported the suit. So did 126 of her Republican
colleagues in the House, including Representative Kevin
McCarthy of California, the minority leader.
“Initially,” Escobar said, “I was so
furious and disgusted. There are lawyers on that list. There are veterans on that list. I was
on the airplane, reading those names, shaking my head, saying, ‘My God, what is
going on here?’ But then there was the hopeful me that looked for the names of
certain colleagues and was relieved that they were not on that list.”
Indeed, 70 House Republicans took a pass.
“That’s where I found my hope,” Escobar
said. “Maybe they’re the path forward.”
There are additional places to find
hope. The vaccination campaign that just began casts government as a
constructive, even lifesaving force. And once enough of us have been
vaccinated, we can — and may yearn to — come together, both literally and
figuratively. Buttigieg envisioned “this return, I hope, to a different kind of
social and physical life by summertime.”
“That just changes what it feels like
to be an American,” he said. “That’s not a policy thing, but it’s a dynamic
that’ll be happening all around us.”
Although House Republicans continued, even after the Electoral
College had spoken, to cower before and coddle President Trump, Senate
Republicans began to sing a more melodious tune, with McConnell as their
unlikely choirmaster.
He not only declared on the Senate
floor that “the Electoral College has spoken” and publicly congratulated
Biden; he also privately instructed Republican senators
not to indulge Trump’s attack on those results.
Biden, ever affable, called and thanked McConnell. Can this marriage indeed
be saved?
Romney’s answer was especially
interesting, as he’s among the small but consequential contingent of Republican
lawmakers from whom the Biden administration would seek cooperation. And he
said that the fate of comity hinged on key variables, some of which are outside
Biden’s control:
“What is Trump going to do?” he
wondered aloud. “Will he get tired of the prospect of being on TV every day and
battling? I don’t think so. Will people move on or will they continue to want
to be entertained by a particularly skilled showman?”
If they remain rapt
and his show is the usual pageant of paranoia and self-pity, it’s hard to see
how Washington changes.
Also, Romney said, “Where does my party
go? That will affect the nature of the dialogue. There are two roads we can
take. One road is: We need to get the youth, we need to do better with
minorities, we need to regain the suburbs that we lost. I don’t see a lot of
people arguing for that.”
He meant in terms of future party
leaders and Republicans who might be looking at the 2024 presidential race.
“Ben Sasse, Chris Christie,” he said, referring to the Nebraska senator and the
former New Jersey governor. “That’s about all that I can come up with.”
But, he added, “the other lane” of politicians
trying to appropriate Trump’s populism is crowded. He mentioned Senators Josh
Hawley, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, along with Ron DeSantis, the
Florida governor, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who
served as Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. If they drive the
Republican conversation, he said, “that would represent a challenging
environment for a Biden administration.”
“On the other hand,” he said, “there
are a number of us who feel a responsibility to work on a bipartisan basis.”
Romney was in a small group of Republicans and Democrats who
proposed a stimulus deal that seemed to move the pandemic-relief legislation
forward, and the House’s and Senate’s later passage of a sweeping $900 billion
relief package, no matter how seriously flawed, “showed the ascendance of
moderates as a new force in a divided Senate” and validated Biden’s “belief
that it is still possible to make deals on Capitol Hill,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times on Monday.
Biden could be helped by the care he
has taken not to seem too partisan himself. “I haven’t evaluated the cabinet
terribly closely, but they have not yet been alarming,” Romney said. “They’re
adults. They’re Democrats and they’re more liberal than I am, but that’s what the
nation has chosen.”
It’s crucial, he said, for Biden “to
recognize that while he won by seven million votes, President Trump got a
record number of votes as well. And part of that is because people were very
fearful of things that they thought he might do.” He gave the Green New Deal as
an example. “Don’t prove the fearmongers right. Don’t go out with a bevy of
cultural actions that will terrify and energize the most extreme voices in my
party.”
And don’t pin all of
the pain caused by the pandemic on Trump. That was the plea of Representative
Susan Brooks, an Indiana Republican who is retiring from Congress after
four terms in the House. “This is not one person’s, one administration’s, one
party’s fault, and yet I can already see that beginning: to place all of this
death and destruction at the feet of President Trump,” she told me. “And that’s
not fair.”
More to the point, it’s not a remedy,
it’s not forward-looking, and it plays into Republicans’ fervent and
comity-thwarting belief that Democrats and the media never, from the very
beginning, gave Trump the benefit of the doubt.
You know who gets that? Biden.
Even as Trump’s irrationally furious
supporters threatened election officials, even as they took violently to the streets, even as Trump and many
Republican lawmakers encouraged them with unsubstantiated claims about
fraudulent votes and even as Biden correctly called this out as
“unconscionable” in that Dec. 14 speech, he emphasized Americans’ goodness and
America’s greatness. It wasn’t just an oratorical feat. It was a spiritual and
emotional one.
“We need to work together to give each
other a chance to lower the temperature,” he said. “We may come from different
places, hold different beliefs, but we share in common a love for this
country.”
That’s another conviction that I
struggle with. But it’s essential — it’s everything — that Joe Biden embraces
it.