We don’t need a McConnell whisperer
“History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” Biden told an Iowa ballroom-full of supporters last week. “This is not the Republican Party,” he continued, noting his longstanding ties to “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”
If this is not the Republican Party, why is it occupying all those Republican seats and passing all those Republican votes and protecting Donald Trump no matter what he does? If it’s not the Republican Party why don’t they all quit, or vote with the Democrats to hobble and then impeach Trump?
Indeed, as The New York Times has reported, “in the Obama White House, he was known as the ‘McConnell whisperer’ for his skills in striking agreements with the often recalcitrant Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.”
And how well that worked! Don’t take my word for it: Ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland. Behold how many Republicans voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act once it was bringing affordable health care to tens of millions of their compatriots. And note the swarms of Republicans who opposed the Trump tax cut for directing a trillion or so dollars to the already super-rich.
For real.
Biden should not be running at all. It’s sheer entitlement and it needs to die.
Jesus christ, he’s doing more work to rehabilitate the image of the Republican Party than the Republicans themselves.
Well, the president certainly isn’t Republican, but the scaffolding that keeps him on his lofty perch certainly is, and they’re fully exploiting the opportunity given them by Trump to do whatever they want so long as they keep him in place. As ‘wjhatever they want’ means ‘all the evil shit previous presidents baulked at’ then, yeah, it’s the Republican Party up to and including Pence. Trump is their enabler, and they are his.
I’m really hoping that Biden isn’t actually this dumb, and is just saying this because he believes (and he may be right) that it’s what most voters want to hear.
I wonder if he views his run as a potential Obama third term that Clinton was supposed to accomplish, note the term aberration when speaking about Trump’s administration.
Biden isn’t that dumb… He’s playing to his base and figures (probably correctly) that the rest of us will fall in line.
Pretty much all of the Dem candidates are engaging in a little bit of fiction. It will be an incredibly uphill battle for the Democrats to take control of the Senate, and even if they did, that would still mean that a Democratic president couldn’t pass anything of substance without the approval of red state Dem senators like Manchin and Jones. So the next Democratic president will be lucky if he or she is “allowed” by Mitch McConnell to fill out a Cabinet and make judicial appointments. In one sense, the candidates arguing over the details of the Green New Deal and free college and Medicare for All etc. is like me arguing which supermodel I’d most like to date.
So Biden’s rote answer is going to be this I’ll-just-invite-Mitch-over-for-a-bourbon bipartisan schlock. I have to admit it’s not any stupider than Bernie’s “the mere act of electing me will magically change the political climate,” and I’m not sure that any of the other candidates have answers of their own.