President Joe Biden and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox disagree on many issues but they were united Saturday in calling for less bitterness in politics and more bipartisanship.

“Politics has gotten too personally bitter,” said Biden, who has practiced politics since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. “It’s just not like it was.” The Democratic president commented while delivering a toast to the nation’s governors and their spouses at a black-tie White House dinner in their honor.

Biden said what makes him “feel good” about hosting the governors is “we have a tradition of doing things together. We fight like hell, we make sure that we get our points across. At the end of the day, we know who we work for. The objective is to get things done.”

  • shikitohno@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    Things have gotten bitter, but you can’t have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don’t engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it’s a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don’t have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can’t deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.

    Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they’re kind of self-sabotaging here. All they’re accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Biden just doesn’t understand what life is like for lots of Americans.

      A shit ton of us have to live in the red states these Republican governors run, and we know they’re terrible people who will never compromise.

      The American president needs to have a realistic worldview, not stuck in a reality that stopped existing literal generations ago.

      Like, he’s reminiscing about Nixon and Regean’s heydays, what rational person thinks things were great back then?

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Also we have a democracy with members who don’t believe in democracy. This is like the UN. A democratic organization with non democratic member states.

      • spider@lemmy.nz
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        8 months ago

        The American president needs to have a realistic worldview, not stuck in a reality that stopped existing literal generations ago.

        Speaking of which, Biden continues to fund Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians because he still views Jews strictly through the prism of the Holocaust.