The candidates’ closing arguments make this clear. Donald Trump is trying — as always — to divide to conquer, demonizing anyone who disagrees with him, averaging a stunning 50 lies a day in an attempt to energize his base in states he won in 2016.
Joe Biden is trying to practice the politics of addition, not division, campaigning in states Trump won last time around and repeating his core argument in a speech on national healing at Warm Springs, Georgia: “I’m running as a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American President. I’ll work with Democrats and Republicans. I’ll work as hard for those who don’t support me as for those who do. That’s the job of a President, a duty of care for everyone.”
It’s a message also hammered home in one of the campaign’s powerful closing ads, which aired during the recent World Series, with these words read by the actor Sam Elliott: “There is so much we can do if we choose to take on problems and not each other … Joe Biden doesn’t need everyone in this country to always agree, just to agree we all love this country and go from there.”
We’ve become so accustomed to seeing American politics through a prism of division in the Trump years that signs of bipartisanship can take us by surprise. But the fact is that we have been witnessing one of the great bipartisan movements in American history in this election.
I’m talking about Republican support for Joe Biden. Because there are more than 750 prominent Republicans — leaders of their party over decades — supporting the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020.
You saw a handful speak at the Democratic convention, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But in the last few weeks, we’ve seen two former Chairmen of the Republican Party – Marc Racicot and Michael Steele – endorse Biden. This is unheard of.
We’ve seen five former Republican Senators — Chuck Hagel; William Cohen; Jeff Flake; Gordon Humphrey and John Warner — as well as 24 former Republican members of Congress side with Biden. And that’s not all: there are more than 500 national security officials from Republican administrations; more than 250 George W. Bush administration alumnae; nearly 50 members of former GOP presidential nominee, Sen. Mitt Romney’s campaigns; and 20 former Republican US Attorneys supporting Biden. And, on top of that, there’s the Lincoln Project, the coalition of former Republican operatives who have made some of the most hard-hitting and viral ads of the cycle.
This isn’t normal. But then these aren’t normal times. It’s common to have a handful of folks cross party lines. For example, we saw Democrats Georgia Sen. Zell Miller and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch back Republican George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection bid, and in 2008, the so called Obamacons — the conservatives who endorsed then Sen. Barack Obama.
But we’ve never seen so many administration veterans endorsing their president’s rival– by last count, more than a half dozen, many of them interviewed by Jake Tapper in his CNN special The Insiders, all warning that President Trump’s reelection would be a threat to the republic.
That’s not even counting those senior administration officials who have — directly or indirectly – warned Americans about the dangers of Donald Trump. People like his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and former Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine General who told friends that President Trump is “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
If you go through all of American history, you can’t find this many former administration officials warning against the reelection of the president they served. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a few defections when he ran for a third term. Harry Truman splintered Democrats into competing Dixiecrat and Progressive Parties and there are always critics writing books at the end of administrations — but nothing like this. And so, the question for all of the above is “why?”
I asked that question to former Navy Secretary and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe — an affable one-time Dick Cheney protégé who is supporting Biden.
“The realization that Edmund Burke was absolutely right: ‘The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing,'” he told me. “This is a real existential threat to this American experiment. There comes a time when you have to say, ‘this is just flat wrong and I can’t abide by that as a citizen.’
“Everybody’s been driven together towards this common goal of electing Biden” — who O’Keefe describes as a “statesman” with a demonstrated ability to work across the aisle to achieve a common objective.
Adm. William McRaven, a legend in military circles, who led the special forces during the time of the Osama Bin Laden raid, endorsed Biden in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing, “We need a President who understands the importance of American leadership, at home and abroad. We need a leader of integrity whose decency and sense of respect reflects the values we expect from our President. We need a President for all Americans, not just half of America.”
That’s Biden’s promise — and it has been core to his presidential pitch. Leadership that looks for common ground is essential, but it won’t solve all our problems overnight. So, the second question that needs to be answered is how did we get to a place where bipartisanship has become a partisan virtue? In this, Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause — but he has exacerbated the underlying condition and used it to complete his hostile takeover of the Republican Party.
This is what happens when political parties become so hyper-partisan that they get held hostage by polarization. There is no effective center-right to provide ballast to the party to resist the demagogues and Donald Trumps of the world –certainly not in partisan primaries. This creates a dynamic where signs of bipartisanship — also known as “solving problems in a democracy” — are dismissed, disrespected and demonized by not just the polarized base and partisan media, but by elected officials who live in fear of those forces conspiring to kill them in a primary.
For Democrats, however, their party is still evenly divided between liberals and moderates/conservatives and, notably, during the primaries, the third quality listed as a priority for Democrats was the ability to work with Republicans. It’s fair to say that this would not rate on a list of Republican priorities, which helps explain why for Republicans from the center-right tradition, Joe Biden is the best option.
Democracy depends upon an assumption of goodwill among fellow citizens. But that fundamental principle has been tested by a tsunami of bad faith and negative partisanship that demonizes political differences and turns political opponents into personal enemies.
That change in tone has come from the top — encouraged and exacerbated by President Trump’s example. A new example, however, can be set as well from the Oval Office. And while it won’t heal all our divisions in the first 100 days or the first 100 weeks, it will be a start toward making our democracy work again by valuing facts and science and interpersonal decency. And that’s the powerful new beginning for bipartisanship that those Biden Republicans are lining up to endorse.
