As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Nancy Kassebaum (Kan.), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

President Bill Clinton delivers a speech on welfare reform—one of his signature bipartisan achievements—during a rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., on Oct. 23, 1996. (Photo by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.