Prior to the presidential election, Joe Biden benefited from the popular wisdom that he is a political centrist and a consensus builder.

These are notions that should already have evaporated less than two months into his presidency. But to hear Biden’s allies tell it, the president is that and so much more. Following Biden’s victory, CNN political analyst David Axelrod delivered one of the more cloying post-election assessments, “Americans looked into Joe Biden’s soul, and liked what they saw.” The night before Biden’s inauguration, CNN political director David Chalian suggested that the lights lining the sides of the National Mall’s reflecting pool were like “extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times’s once-conservative columnist David Brooks said of the inaugural speech, “The Biden values are there: humility, vulnerability, compassion, resilience, interdependence, solidarity.” Brooks predicted that Biden “sets the stage for a moral revival.” The presidential speechwriters obviously have been instructed to emphasize these supposed qualities at every opportunity.