This is quite a good piece by Ezra Klein. I find it hard to summarize, the best I can do is that Klein thinks Biden misunderstands the nature of the past era of comity he wants to return to, and that misunderstanding will have huge consequences for any effort he makes to bargain now.
An example of this is Biden’s story about working with Eastland back in the day. Klein writes:
But there isn’t a hint of structural analysis to be found. What he misses is the context of his relationship with Eastland. And in missing that context, he draws the wrong lesson.
The story of Biden and Eastland’s relationship is the story of the mid-20th-century US Senate in miniature. Eastland was a conservative and a segregationist, but he was, like Biden, a Democrat. The existence of these conservative Southern Democrats — the Dixiecrats — was the fundamental fact of Congress in the mid-20th century.
…
Biden could cut deals with Eastland because it was in Eastland’s interest to cut deals with him. Eastland’s power — his committee chairmanship — came from remaining a Democrat in good standing. If he didn’t cut deals and build relationships with young bucks like Biden, his influence was over. This was the strategy and the structure of the Dixiecrat bloc.
This kind of driver to deal-making and cooperation is non-existent structurally in today’s Senate. There is no block of strong conservatives who are nominally Democrats and thus dependent on the goodwill of liberal Democrats to secure and retain committee assignments. Actual conservatives are almost all Republicans of the crazier variety, and cooperation with Democrats is not only useless to them, it is probably toxic for them.
Of Biden’s claims of more recent deal-making, e.g. the deal to amend the Bush tax cuts, Klein writes:
The bigger issue with Biden’s recollections is that he seems confused about the role he really played. Biden didn’t create these deals. He was a vessel for them. When McConnell knew he needed to make a deal with Obama but didn’t want the blowback of negotiating with the person his base hated most, Biden acted as the go-between. That’s a valuable role, and Biden was well-suited to it. But if Biden is president, then he’ll be the guy McConnell’s base hates most.
There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that it was McConnell who wanted the deal, that the Senate Democratic leadership hated the deal, and that Biden’s role was to give McConnell what he wanted over their objections.
Klein suggests that there is little about Biden’s career that would obviously translate into the ability to break the impasse in a good way with Republicans. And he suggests further that Biden is incapable of understanding that; that he’s the product of the institution he’s spent his life in, and can’t separate his own abilities from the natural structural results of a time and Senate that no longer exist.
