How Biden pushes both unity and partisanship

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. President Joe Biden’s [first prime time address to the nation]( was a model of what the late political scientist Richard Fenno was talking about when he described representation as a process. Doing representation correctly won’t get Biden re-elected or even make him popular, but it matters anyway for lots of reasons, including that representation is one of the core parts of democratic governing. So it’s worth diving in a bit about what was going on Thursday night. For Fenno, representation involved making promises during a campaign, interpreting those promises and governing with them in mind, and then explaining governing actions in the context of the original promises. (Later, Fenno’s politicians return to the campaign trail, making a new set of promises that repeat and build on the old ones, but we haven’t reached that stage yet). What Biden promised on the campaign trail came down to two things, seemingly in some tension with each other. One was returning to politics-as-usual, following the disruptions of Donald Trump’s presidency. That was a promise he made to the entire nation, including to those who opposed him. The other? An aggressive, liberal policy agenda — not quite what Senator Bernie Sanders had offered, but even farther from the moderate, centrist approach others in the party had proposed. Biden, somewhat confusingly, calls all of that “unity.” That was the key word of his inaugural address in January and he elaborated on it Thursday night. “National unity isn't just how politics and politicians vote in Washington,” he explained. Instead, it’s “what we do together as fellow Americans,” which in context seemed to be mainly about following pandemic guidelines and getting the vaccine. That’s … still, maybe, fairly confusing. Indeed, I can think of two interpretations. The one I don’t like is anti-political: It suggests that “politics” is something separate from regular life, and that it divides people who otherwise should be working together toward common goals. That sounds like President Barack Obama’s constant refrain that whatever he was saying must be done wasn’t a Democratic idea or a Republican idea, it was just what all sensible people would do. Perhaps it’s also what Biden was going for. If so, it doesn’t really work; if politics is something inferior to the rest of our lives, then a normal president and a partisan agenda just wouldn’t go together. There’s another way of reading what he’s saying, which I think would include both his invocation Thursday night of the nation’s can-do spirit (finding vaccines, reaching to Mars) and his partisan policy agenda. That reading of “unity” would treat the disagreements inherent in living together with over 300 million people, and the often messy or even ugly political process involved in making collective choices, as a healthy and positive part of a process that allows everyone to feel a part of the polity, even after losing elections or policy battles. And it would claim the liberal tradition of government activism (World War II! The space program!) as an essential part of that unity. Without denying that there are many different policy paths, it would assert that what we share is the choice of many options that democratic politics presents. For Biden, what brings all of that together is the head-of-state function that is perhaps more central to his presidency than it’s been for other modern presidents: his ability to express empathy for the entire nation, earned through the pain of his own personal losses. I think it’s that pain that’s made him difficult to parody, even affectionately, right now — even though he was an easy-to-mock vice president, mostly before he had yet another family tragedy — but also before the nation was overwhelmed with the calamity of the last year. What’s more, because [Trump rejected the role of head of state](, Biden’s embrace of it is a straightforward way of returning to a normal presidency, and thus keeping that part of his promise. And perhaps it reminds us that normal presidents also play roles, such as legislator-in-chief and party leader, that makes Biden’s liberal policy agenda another normal part of his presidency — thus squaring the circle to make his two promises compatible. Biden only said some of that explicitly Thursday night, but presidents don’t have to make all their promises explicit. Nor do they have to spell out the relationship between their actions and their promises. I think, however, that what Biden was saying about his presidency was clear to those who were listening. 1. Dan Drezner on the fiscal and monetary [economic responses to the pandemic](. 2. Steven Teles on a possible [Republican future in the cities](. 3. Jose J. Padilla, Erika Frydenlund and Katherine Palacio at the Monkey Cage on [migration in South America](. 4. Kevin Collins on [the evolution of polling](. 5. Kara Voght on former [staffers for Senator Elizabeth Warren]( now placed in the Biden administration. 6. Ariane de Vogue on Biden’s upcoming [nominees for the federal judicial bench](. 7. Ed Kilgore on some [weak arguments]( against the pandemic relief bill. 8. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox looks back at some [previous pandemics.]( Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. 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