Former Vice President Joe Biden said the next president has to unite the country, and having a solid plan for big problems isn’t enough.
"We need someone with proven ability to bring people together and do the hard work of getting legislation passed," Biden said at a Dec. 13 rally in San Antonio, Texas. "I have done that before — finding the Republican votes for the Recovery Act, Obamacare, helping us from falling into a Great Depression."
Given Biden’s emphasis on uniting the country, a reasonable interpretation is that he was talking about bringing together Democrats and Republicans. Biden’s staff told us he was talking broadly about his track record of passing key legislation, not necessarily to have won support from Republicans.
To the extent this was about bipartisanship, the two bills he picked don’t prove his point.
When the Democrats took the White House and both houses of Congress in 2009, they inherited a nation on a steep slide into the Great Recession. Their first major act was to pass a bill to kickstart the economy, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The bill passed 60 to 38, the number needed to avoid a filibuster, with just three Republican senators voting in favor: Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania. Not a single Republican in the House backed the bill. Biden pushed for passage; so did President Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership.