Both Biden and Coons think that there is some special potency to their brand of bipartisanship, but there are differences in how both men explain away the ongoing ineffectiveness of bipartisanship.
For both of them, bipartisanship is a magic key that will unlock every door and solve every problem, but when bipartisanship inevitably fails as it always does in the age of Rove/Bush/Trump/McConnell, Coons typically believes that the pursuit of bipartisanship by Democrats wasn’t obsequious enough. Coons views the failure of bipartisanship as a failure of Democrats to compromise sufficiently.
Biden, on the other hand, simply misremembers the past and lives in a fantasy world in which bipartisanship always works in spite of 30 years of evidence to the contrary.
Matt Viser
✔
@mviser
Joe Biden remarks that he called about a dozen Senate Republicans to encourage them to vote on Merrick Garland. Then he says with Trump gone, Republicans will again find political courage.Left unsaid: Republicans stalled on Garland before Trump was nominated, or elected.
