President Joe Biden, who campaigned on lowering the temperature after former President Donald Trump, seems resigned to the inevitability of political incivility now that he is in the White House.
Biden’s lackadaisical response to activist harassment of members of his own party raises fresh questions about how committed he is to changing the tone in Washington.
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Biden chided protesters this week who kayaked up to West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s Potomac River-moored houseboat and male and female activists who filmed Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she guest lectures. The president said their invasive strategies against his own party members, who are pivotal votes delaying his $3.5 trillion social welfare and climate spending package, were not “appropriate” but that similar intrusions happen “to everybody.”
“The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around them,” he told reporters Monday. “It’s part of the process.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended Biden’s “process” comments hours later. Psaki underscored the president’s support of “the freedom to protest, to speak out, and to criticize” as “fundamental to our democracy.” But while she repeated that the Sinema incident on Sunday in particular was “inappropriate and unacceptable,” her condemnation was limited.
“They shouldn’t breach the classroom and make the students feel like their privacy, their intellectually stimulating classroom, and their time as students in college is being broached upon,” Psaki said when needled on whether she would ask them not to do it again.
But neither Biden nor Psaki deterred demonstrators from badgering Sinema on her flight back to Washington or at Reagan National Airport on Monday — three years after notorious confrontations during the Trump administration occurred, such as then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being kicked out of a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant and former Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, being cornered in a congressional elevator over now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
There are still “isolated instances of nastiness,” but “the near-daily maelstrom” of the Trump years has abated, according to Lawrence Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.
“Of course we are a deeply divided and distrustful country so we haven’t reached Bidenland of 1970s comity. We have returned to pre-Trump civility that we saw during Clinton, Bush, and Obama,” he told the Washington Examiner of former Presidents Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s, and Barack Obama’s administrations.
But Jacobs’s remarks are not reflected in a Fox News poll published last month. Pollsters found that 54% of voters believed the country was less united since Biden became president despite the former senator and vice president running on his ability to bring people together and deploying the word “unity” eight times in his inaugural address. Another 37% of respondents disagreed, as some liberals said they hope Kavanaugh dies after testing positive for COVID-19 and the Justice Department starts investigating threats against school boards over their coronavirus responses.
Unpleasant exchanges between politicians and voters are not a new phenomenon, presidential historian Brian Rosenwald said. He named infamous examples, including former President Lyndon Johnson on the eve of the 1960 election and disgraced ex-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski in 1989.
For Rosenwald, Biden has bridged chasms in “a narrow realm.” The president is “not exacerbating the already built-in polarization that has been worsening for decades,” but Trump had “raised the stakes,” according to the University of Pennsylvania scholar and author.
“People on the Left and Never Trump Right see Trump as a grave threat to American democracy, which justifies tactics that might be unnecessary when there is less risk,” Rosenwald said. “The Right has felt like its values have been under siege for decades, also justifying extremism — in many ways, the embrace of Trump was a sign of this. They were willing to accept his many flaws because of his pugilistic style and his warrior mentality.”
Biden himself has momentarily dropped his “Uncle Joe” persona. Psaki had to parse the difference between “Neanderthal” and “Neanderthal thinking” last spring when she was pressed on the president’s description of Mississippi and Texas’s Republican governors after they rolled back mask mandates.
“What everybody saw yesterday was a reflection of his frustration and exasperation, which I think many American people have, that for almost a year now, people across the country have sacrificed,” she said.
Biden also snapped at CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins this summer when she prodded the president on why he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin would become less adversarial. He later apologized for being a “wise guy.”
“I’m not confident I’m going to change his behavior. What the hell? What do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident?” Biden replied. “If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business.”
Biden has not had many interactions with voters since moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But during the 2020 campaign, the president called one Iowa man “a damn liar” and “fat” when he asked about his son Hunter Biden’s $50,000-a-month position on Burisma’s board despite having no experience in Ukraine’s energy sector.
But during a speech Tuesday, Biden did reference protesters outside a Michigan union engineer training center holding placards that read, “F*** Joe,” among others.
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“Not withstanding some of the signs I saw coming in,” the president said before promoting his infrastructure-plus agenda. “That’s why 81 million Americans voted for me — the largest number of votes in American history, a clear majority who supported it when they supported me. Look, it’s now time to deliver.”
