Despite making “unity” a theme of his campaign, American voters feel this country is less united on Joe Biden’s watch, according to a new poll from Fox News.
“By a 54-37 percent margin, they think the country is less united under Biden rather than more so,” the network reports.
Many thanks to @JoeBiden the "unity" and "compromise" candidate of 2020. pic.twitter.com/7Y13j0jBFL
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) September 19, 2021
It’s a stunning result, given that Biden branded himself as the candidate who could unify the country and bring compromise to Washington, D.C., yet it’s also hardly surprising, as the Biden administration has repeatedly made it clear that “unity” is actually not their objective.
Joe Biden never released a public statement following the death of Rush Limbaugh, nor did he order the lowering of the flag in his honor—something Cheryl Chumley of the Washington Times noted Barack Obama did frequently for celebrities and high-profile Americans. Biden may not have agreed with Limbaugh’s politics, but his influence on millions of Americans was undeniable.
Of course, “unity” was just a slogan for Joe Biden. It was a focus-group-tested buzzword that gave cover for anti-Trump conservatives to support his candidacy because it allowed them to claim that Biden would work with Republicans in Congress on a compromise agenda—which obviously wasn’t ever going to happen. Back in April, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that Joe Biden never intended to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill at all. Psaki said Joe Biden’s view is “that bringing the country together is bringing the American people together. So, when I say he’s, uhh, focused on bringing people together, bringing Democrats and Republicans together, he’s not talking about solving bipartisanship in [Washington, D.C.].”
The big problem with that statement, of course, is that Biden did promise to compromise with congressional Republicans to achieve bipartisan unity. He even used his inaugural address to say he would work with Republicans to address the nation’s problems. Sadly, Joe Biden, despite his many years in Washington, doesn’t know anything about compromise. Like Barack Obama before him, he sees the presidency as an opportunity to steamroll his opponents rather than make an honest effort at achieving bipartisan support. I often criticized Barack Obama for his my way or the highway approach to “compromise,” and Joe Biden is clearly following that same path. Biden would sooner achieve his legislative objectives with a party-line vote than boast about bipartisan support for his agenda.
We’ve often seen presidential candidates promise to unify this country—though few actually mean it.
But I have seen it in my lifetime.
In the wake of the bitterly fought 2000 election, President George W. Bush clearly saw the importance of working with the Democrats, and repeatedly reached out to them. Bush infamously worked with the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, and managed to get bipartisan support for his tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and many other things. Democrats would eventually stab him in the back repeatedly, and by the time Barack Obama took office, bipartisanship had become an outmoded concept because Obama used his supermajority in Congress to push through his radical agenda without Republican support. Even Obamacare took a lot of backroom deals to get enough Democrats on board.
But Biden was supposed to be different—that is, if you believed him in the first place, which I didn’t. He was supposed to bring his years of experience on Capitol Hill to the White House to make deals and get both parties on board. But he never even tried. He just went for the radical agenda that Republicans would never support because in the post-Obama era, being “transformative” is more important than being bipartisan.
