In the Age of Trump, Bipartisanship Is Losing Its Allure

President Obama first gained national acclaim with a 2004 speech that encouraged Americans to focus on what united them. In an often-repeated quote, he said we must remember that “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America.” Obama may have won two elections with a message of unity and bipartisanship, but as Gideon Resnick and Sam Stein report in The Daily Beast, some of Obama’s most devoted advisers, as well as the Democratic party’s base, have a message for candidates hoping to do the same: “Don’t.”

“There’s this sort of older way of thinking about politics where it’s all about personal relationships. … That’s not how politics works,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama told Resnick and Stein. He added, “Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell had shared a bottle of whiskey once and McConnell went out and stole a Supreme Court seat from him.”

Ben LaBolt, a former national press secretary for Obama’s re-election campaign, concurred regarding the prospects for a harmonious relationship between the two parties. He told The Daily Beast that “I think all of the pixie dust in the world couldn’t make that happen. Believe me, we tried it. We said it. We prayed for it. It wasn’t going to happen. It’s not going happen now and it’s not going to happen ever.”

Democrats, as a Gallup Poll revealed earlier this year, are increasingly liberal. Forty-six percent surveyed between 2013 and 2018 identified as liberal, compared with 39 percent between 2007 and 2012, and 32 percent between 2001 and 2006. Multiple Democratic candidates for president, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are running on a platform of taxing the rich, which polls from Politico/Morning Consult and The Hill/Harris X show, is a policy with strong public support.

The Democratic base, Resnick and Stein report, “Is eager to see its field of candidates dispense with the notion that a dash of reason and a heaping of fraternizing can be effective in moving legislation.” Current and former lawmakers among the candidates, however, are reluctant to let bipartisanship go.

During a speech in Omaha, Neb., last week, former vice president and potential 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden called current Vice President Mike Pence a “decent guy,” for which he received extensive backlash from activists and lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Warren, who objected to Pence’s anti-LGBTQ record. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who has already announced her candidacy, touted her record of working with Republicans during a speech at the Gridiron Dinner. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said in an interview on “Meet The Press” that he was eager to work with the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

The issue of whether to work with Republicans and to stress bipartisan deal-making abilities, has, Resnick and Stein report, “created a bit of a divide within the party writ large, with one camp believing that voters still yearn for an element of compromise (or an attempt at it) and another arguing it would be criminally stupid for Democrats to waste their time.”

Read the full article from The Daily Beast here.