Democrats and Republicans are Talking Past Each Other
President Biden's speech to Congress and Senator Tim Scott's response show that both parties are more focused on preaching to the choir than reaching across the aisle
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
One of the nice things about no longer being a regular newspaper columnist is that I’m no longer required to write wrap-up columns of major political speeches - like President Biden’s address last night to a joint session of Congress. Still, there was one interesting takeaway from Biden’s speech that is worthy of note.
As I’ve written at Truth and Consequences several times, we’ve entered a new political word, defined by polarization, and in which both parties are far more focused on mobilizing their base than persuading swing voters. Last night’s address by Biden and the response from South Carolina Senator Tim Scott further prove that point.
Biden’s speech offered a sweeping and progressive vision of his presidential agenda - paid family leave, universal pre-K, expanded child care, billions for health care coverage and higher education, and all of it paid for with higher taxes on the wealthy. The White House would, of course, argue that this is the kind of agenda that appeals to all Americans - and they’re not necessarily wrong - but it’s also a vision of America’s future that doesn’t provide much political incentive for Republican politicians to get on board.
Biden attacked Reaganonomics, declaring that “trickle-down economics has never worked.” He went after the Trump 2017 tax cut, which practically every Republican in the chamber had supported, in strongly populist terms. In patting himself on the back for the extraordinary success of his administration’s efforts on vaccine distribution, he didn’t bother to throw a bone to the last administration for its efforts to help develop the vaccine. He mocked Republicans for their refusal to support gun control measures, asking them if they think hunted animals are wearing Kevlar vests. And he didn’t shy away from hot button issues like immigration, voting rights, or LGBTQ rights, as he declared to “transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave … your president has your back.”
Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with any of this. A Democratic president should use a joint session to articulate his legislative agenda. But this wasn’t a speech intended to win over Republicans — and Biden barely made much effort to try and openly woo Republicans. It was one pitched directly to his supporters.
Not surprisingly, the GOP responded in kind, not even rising to applaud when Biden said the recently enacted American Rescue Plan (ARP) would reduce child poverty by half. Republicans also sat on their hands when Biden boasted about the ARP’s role in ensuring every American has access to clean drinking water. If you can’t find common ground on clean water and getting kids out of poverty, then I’m not sure it’s ever going to happen.
Senator Tim Scott offered more of the same in his response to Biden. Like the president, he offered fig leaf support for bipartisan solutions. But when you’re falsely accusing the president of wanting to pack the Supreme Court, use tax dollars to fund abortions, and accuse him of dividing America after four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, you’re not serious about working across the aisle. When you then defend the Georgia voting law by saying that Republicans want to make it “easier to vote” and declare that “America is not a racist country,” it’s pretty obvious that your speech is not directed at finding common ground. Boosting Scott’s chances of being the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is the true goal.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with that. Scott is a politician, and he’s interested in promoting himself in advance of 2024. But his speech, in particular, speaks to the fact that both parties are increasingly talking to themselves. Their focus is on reassuring and mobilizing their political base and not really even pitching themselves to persuadable voters. That’s obviously less true of Biden, but it’s not hard to see his speech as leaning into many of the GOP’s criticisms of him and his ambitious agenda.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What Biden proposed on Wednesday night is the kind of vision of America’s future that this country desperately needs. He is offering as ambitious and far-reaching a domestic agenda as any president in our lifetime. Why waste his time with the gauzy platitudes of bipartisanship when everyone in Washington knows that Republicans aren’t going to support that vision? Why should Scott even pretend that Republicans want to work with Democrats when that clearly isn’t their intention? More honesty in American politics is good.
But all of this does speak to something very broken about our national politics. Both parties increasingly recognize that polarization has so clearly come to define our political interactions that there isn’t much benefit in trying to win over voters. Granted, this is more true of Republicans than Democrats, but it’s still a reality, and increasingly both parties are responding to it accordingly.
As polarization becomes more ingrained — and there’s little reason to believe that it won’t — we’re going to need to recalibrate how we think about politics in this country. The usual political metrics and assumptions will need to be adjusted. No longer will it be the economy stupid since it’s increasingly evident that a president’s political fortunes are no longer tied to the economy's performance. With a shrinking number of swing voters, we can stop focusing on this vanishing breed. We will have to move past the idea that a good policy outcome will translate into votes when ultimately it is partisan identification that matters far more.
Last night’s two speeches offered us a preview of what is coming.
One More Thing …
It’s also worthy of note that according to the snap polls of Biden’s speech, they received overwhelming support.
But I strongly suspect that these numbers are so high because it was mostly Democrats that were watching. So it’s not just a question of politicians preaching to the choir. It’s that those who are listening are the choir - and Republicans may simply be tuning out the president because he’s a Democrat.
Before I Go ….
Ok, just one more item to flag today. The New York Times reported this week that the Biden administration is proposing to spend $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax fraud and those who don’t pay federal taxes. The effort is expected to raise at least $700 billion over ten years. This is a huge deal because aside from bringing more revenue into the federal government it will level the playing field between rich and poor. Fully funding the IRS may seem like a small thing, but the benefits are enormous, particularly in providing funding for the president’s ambitious agenda. As of now, an estimated one-third of all unpaid taxes come from the top one percent of taxpayers. According to a recent op-ed in the New York Times, “a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report published last year found the I.R.S. had failed to follow up with more than 369,000 high-income households that simply did not file a tax return in prior years.” We’re talking about literally trillions of dollars in tax revenue lost because of a lack of enforcement.
Biden’s move will reverse decades of Republican efforts to cut the IRS’s budget and make it more difficult to track down tax cheats. I bring this up because it speaks to how forward-thinking this administration is being on domestic policy. It seems as though every smart, innovative idea - from paid family leave and more money for community colleges and universal pre-k and better tax enforcement - pushed by progressive policy wonks over the past decade is getting a hearing inside the White House and is likely to become law.
In years past, Democratic presidents might have been afraid to talk about fully funding the IRS for fear of playing into the GOP stereotype of tax-and-spend Democrats. But Biden is fulling leaving into it. He even referenced the move in his speech to Congress. Quite simply, this is a very different Democratic Party and one that is willing to be unabashedly populist and progressive. It’s no small exaggeration to say that we’ve never seen this before from a Democratic president.
Musical Interlude
Today’s musical pick was too easy - here’s a solid live version of the Beatles’ “Taxman” featuring Geroge Harrison and a pair of great solos from Eric Clapton.
This is a pretty stellar cover of the song by Joe Bonamassa.