Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

The explosive exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is what the June debates will be remembered for, and it may even help determine whether either candidate wins the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. But the two-night debate, the first of the 2020 presidential campaign, also sharpened an intraparty divide that is far more important for how the next Democratic president governs.

The 2020 Democratic primary has become a war between two visions of American politics. There’s the view that any compromise with Republicans is a fool’s game, and then there’s the Joe Biden view, that bipartisanship and civility are necessary because that’s how Washington works.


On Wednesday night, Elizabeth Warren took one side, shrugging off the prospect of a Republican-led Senate with a pledge to give no quarter and “fight” on. The next night, Biden cited his ability to work with Mitch McConnell, the Republican obstructionist-in-chief during the Obama presidency, to raise taxes, only to hear Sen. Michael Bennet trash Biden’s work on the 2012 tax deal as an abject surrender to the Republican Party.

Biden has been attacked, understandably, for naming segregationists among the people he’s practiced “civility” with. The brutal rejoinder he suffered at the hands of Harris during Thursday night’s debate may even unravel his presidential bid. But should that happen, his political case for bipartisanship should not go down with his candidacy. Progressives ignore the case for bipartisanship at their peril: During the Obama administration, bipartisanship actually worked.

You don’t hear this much these days. A foundational myth has set in, among moderate Democrats as well as progressive activists, that Mitch McConnell’s relentless obstructionism throttled the Obama administration completely and enabled the rise of Donald Trump. But this potted history leaves out a lot of chapters—the actual bipartisan accomplishments that Biden can rightly point to from his service under President Barack Obama.

“The Obama administration?!” most Democrats will splutter. “Those exasperating eight years of relentless Republican obstructionism? When the debt ceiling was taken hostage, when the government was shut down in hopes of destroying the Affordable Care Act, when Merrick Garland’s seat was stolen?” Yes.

The paradoxical truth of the Obama presidency is that even though McConnell was engaged in extreme obstructionism, nearly every one of Obama’s legislative achievements passed with Republican votes. Conversely, the Trump administration’s general disdain for bipartisanship has left it with a wispy legislative record and a shaky argument for reelection. As Democrats debate how their party should govern, they should get their own recent history right.

***

Beyond his misguided callback to the 1970s, on the campaign trail, Biden has pointed to his successful effort to win the support of three Republicans for Obama’s first major act: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an enormous blast of Keynesian stimulus that arrested the 2008 stock market crash and began the economy’s slow but steady recovery. But this example does not impress the post-Obama skeptics of bipartisanship.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, a moderate known for scrapping with left-wingers, sees the Recovery Act as evidence of bipartisanship’s futility: “Those three Republicans faced such intense backlash from the right that one of them, Arlen Specter, was driven out of the party altogether, and the other two, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, subsequently refused to support any health care bill on any terms. The aftermath of the success was such that it could never be repeated.” Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler, a reliable progressive voice, argues that if a Biden-like Democratic president who campaigned on bipartisanship actually tried to follow through, the president’s supporters would be “demoralized” and his or her presidency would “stagnate.”

Yet Biden actually undersells the case for bipartisanship, as experienced by the Obama administration he served in. Wall Street reform, the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” criminal justice reform, food safety regulations, and ratification of an arms control treatywith Russia all cleared Congress in the first two years of the Obama presidency with Republican votes—and could not have passed the Senate without those votes. (The Affordable Care Act was the one big exception, clearing Congress during a brief window when Democrats had 60 Senate votes.) Despite Chait’s assertion, the post-stimulus backlash against Republican moderates didn’t prevent future GOP cooperation with Obama.

Most of these bills required compromises to win Republican votes, and those compromises have long chafed the left. The three Republicans who backed the stimulus forced Democrats to shave about $100 billion off the estimated cost, prompting cries from progressives that the final bill was too small because it fell short of $1 trillion, leading to a longer, weaker economic recovery that could have been avoided with a larger stimulus. Specter, who had long battled cancer, also insisted that $10 billion in stimulus money go toward the National Institutes of Health. Likewise, when progressive populist Sen. Russ Feingold rejected the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill because it failed to break up big banks, Obama and Senate Democrats were forced to appease Republican Sen. Scott Brown and secure the bill’s 60th vote by stripping out $19 billion in proposed fees on financial institutions that would have affected some firms, and donors, from his home state of Massachusetts.

Such sausage-making might be unseemly. But this is the kind of transactional bipartisanship that can still be pursued in Washington, even in polarized times, because it hinges on self-interest, which never goes out of style.

Besides, what was the alternative? To refuse a compromise over the stimulus risked not having a stimulus at all, which would have led to a deep economic depression that, beyond creating widespread and unnecessary suffering, would have likely sidelined the rest of Obama’s domestic agenda and destroyed any chance of a second term. And while the conservative backlash to the stimulus was intense, to give up on further bipartisanship in the name of uncompromising progressivism would have meant giving up on additional progressive reforms, and the entire Obama presidency.

The antibipartisan contingent among Democrats also views the two tax deals of Obama’s first term, orchestrated by Biden and McConnell, as evidence of weak-kneed capitulation. In Thursday’s debate, Bennet deemed the final tax compromise as “a complete victory for the Tea Party” and a “great deal for Mitch McConnell” because it “extended almost all those Bush tax cuts permanently.” That’s a misleading characterization that ignores how those tax deals helped the economy and saved Obama’s then-uncertain presidency.

The 2010 deal, forged the month after Republicans took the House in the Tea Party-powered midterm elections, featured a two-year extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts that were due to expire, in exchange for a 13-month extension of long-term unemployment insurance in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. The only reason the Bush tax cuts were on a timer is that the bipartisan coalition that enacted them ignored Bush’s repeated pleas to make them permanent, out of fear of exploding the long-term deficit. But to let them expire at the end of 2010 meant an abrupt increase in taxes—on the wealthy and the middle class—when the economic recovery was fragile.

Nevertheless, keeping the Bush tax cuts in place was treated as a betrayal. Bernie Sanders elevated his profile with an eight-hour Senate floor speech lambasting the deal. (“His Twitter account picked up 4,000 new followers,” marveled POLITICO at the time.) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman feared the deal meant the Bush tax cuts would keep getting extended in perpetuity, and counseled Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts expire and try to affix blame on the Republican “blackmailers.”

Yet the Biden-McConnell deal proved both economically and politically wise for Obama. More tax cuts and unemployment insurance amounted to a second stimulus, of approximately $300 billion, to the still-weak economy. During the first two quarters of 2012, Obama’s reelection year, the annualized rate of growth in gross domestic product (the only GDP growth numbers known before Election Day) didn’t crack 2 percent. Swap that extra shot of Keynes with a dose of austerity—in the form of a tax hike—and there could have been a double-dip recession right before the election. Presidents typically get the blame for recessions, so trying to finger Republicans for recalcitrance probably would have backfired.

Instead, Obama won a second term, and he strengthened his hand for the next round of tax talks. At the end of 2012, the negotiations centered on how rich you had to be to keep benefiting from Bush’s reduced tax rates; Obama campaigned on extending the tax cuts only for married couples earning less than $250,000 and individuals less than $200,000. McConnell’s initial counter was an income threshold of $750,000. With Biden leading the negotiation, they met roughly halfway, making the tax cuts permanent for the first $450,000 of income for couples and $400,000 for individuals.

Biden’s dealing once again attracted complaints, fed by disgruntled aides of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had been negotiating with McConnell until Biden swooped in. According to a New Republic account soon after the deal was struck, Reid’s offer to McConnell, a $450,000 threshold for couples and $360,000 for individuals, wasn’t all that different than Biden’s.

A recent account by Ryan Grim in the Intercept differs somewhat, saying that in his negotiations with Reid, McConnell preliminarily “agreed to let rates on people making more than $250,000 per year go back up, if to slightly lower levels to pre-Bush,” McConnell aides push back slightly, saying in Grim’s words that “McConnell had not firmly conceded anything, and that negotiations weren’t finalized.”

What’s consistent in both accounts, and confirmed by Reid himself in Grim’s story, is that Reid didn’t want a quick deal. He wanted to go over the “fiscal cliff,” letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone, in hopes that would shift the dialogue from whose taxes should be raised to whose taxes should be cut.

Maybe that would have produced a more progressive result. But that’s a big if. It also could have led to no deal at all, meaning the Bush tax cuts would have expired for everyone, violating Obama’s campaign pledge to prevent a middle-class tax hike during what was still a tenuous economic recovery and likely leaving Democrats to shoulder the blame.

Ever since that 2012 deal, the left and right have grabbed the statistic that 82 percent of the original Bush tax cuts remained in place—the left to grouse, the right to crow. In Grim’s report, so did an anonymous Republican operative. Just as Bennet has claimed McConnell got everything he wanted out of the deal, so did an anonymous Republican operative in Grim’s report.

That’s nonsense. Much of what remained from the Bush tax package after the compromise was geared to the middle class. In 2001, President George W. Bush stated as his key principle of his tax cut, “No one should pay more than a third of the money they earn in federal income taxes”—a goal designed to benefit the rich, since the middle-class already paid a rate lower than that. Bush settled for a top rate of 35 percent. The Biden-McConnell deal bumped that up to almost 40 percent, a rate that doesn’t include the Medicare tax surcharges targeting the wealthy that were part of the Affordable Care Act. After the deal, a New York Times headline reported that the tax code “May Be the Most Progressive Since 1979.” That’s not what McConnell or any Republican wanted, and that's why tax reform favoring the wealthy was a top priority of the highly partisan Republican agenda after Trump’s 2016 victory.

Trump’s record of bipartisanship is horrible, but it’s not quite nonexistent. The “First Step” criminal justice reform bill, for example, was passed in December on an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. That was after Democrats, including now-presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, worked with the Trump administration to find common ground, proving that bipartisanship is still possible even in Trump’s Washington.

It’s true that bipartisanship has been more the exception than the rule in both the Obama and Trump presidencies. But string enough exceptions together, and you have yourself a successful presidency. Obama did that, and so far at least, Trump hasn’t.

The next president, if it is a Democrat, of course won’t face the exact same Congress as Obama did, but Washington will almost certainly still be a polarized place. A Democratic supermajority reaching or even approaching 60 votes in the next Senate is essentially impossible. Democrats now hold 47 Senate seats and need to net three more to claim a majority under a Democratic president. But only three Republican-held Senate seats on the ballot in 2020 are considered competitive right now. A few more states may be put into play, but almost surely not 10 more. In all likelihood, the next president will face a closely divided Senate.

The solution proposed by Warren and other Democratic “hyperpartisans” is to abolish the legislative filibuster and grease the path for ambitious progressive legislation. However, a closely divided Senate complicates that strategy. A narrow Democratic majority may retain enough institutionalists who won’t readily join an effort to use extraordinary parliamentary procedures for scuttling senatorial minority rights, even under pressure from a president with a mandate for drastic reforms. One such potential institutionalist: Bennet, who, despite his disparagement of McConnell, says that his greatest political regret is voting to abolish the filibuster for executive-branch nominees.

And junking the legislative filibuster is a nonstarter if a Democratic president faces a Republican-led Senate. The next president would either have to try to find some common ground with McConnell, or fight him nonstop and hope for a good midterm election. Warren, asked during Wednesday night’s debate how she would handle a Senate Majority Leader McConnell, suggested her plan would be the latter. “Short of a Democratic majority in the Senate, you better understand the fight still goes on,” she said. But a two-year fight without much significant legislation is not a great record to run on for your first midterm. Ask Trump about that.

Obama did turn to executive action in his second term, when the fruits of bipartisanship dwindled because Republicans took control of the House. Obama’s second-term achievements are therefore more partisan than the legislation passed in his first term—and they’ve been less enduring. Much of what Obama tried to accomplish through the executive branch, such as his climate protection plan and his legalization of more than 3 million undocumented immigrant parents, was blocked by the courts or repealed by the subsequent Congress. One notable exception is the “DACA” program that allows children of the undocumented to legally stay and work, a program that has stuck around only by the grace of temporary judicial orders. Without a bipartisan consensus that can sustain support through multiple presidencies, such programs will remain on tenuous ground.

Yes, Republicans have been extremely difficult for Democrats to work with. No, Biden can’t count on Republicans having a change of heart after a Trump defeat (though we should not assume that Republicans wouldn’t change at all after an electoral thrashing). But bipartisanship has happened—however infrequently, begrudgingly, and painstakingly—even during two of the most polarizing presidencies in modern American history, because the legislative math required it.

Biden is not the only presidential candidate who can argue she or he can be effective at practicing bipartisanship, and because two-thirds of Democrats say they prefer politicians who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions,” more candidates may want to tout their compromising skills. Booker, during the Wednesday debate, took pride in his bipartisan triumph of criminal justice reform. The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Sen. Amy Klobuchar the most effective Democratic senator of the 115th Congress, in part because of her bipartisan outreach. Gov. Steve Bullock and former Gov. John Hickenlooper regularly cite their home state experiences constructively working with Republicans. But as a member of the Obama administration, Biden is the candidate best-positioned to counter the flawed notion that the pursuit of bipartisanship was Obama’s greatest weakness.

Even so, Biden might not be best positioned for anything if he can’t recover from the debate drubbing he took from Harris. But Harris appeared to recognize she shouldn’t attack Biden's belief in bipartisanship when she said, “I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.” And she has been reluctant to join Warren’s push for abolishing the legislative filibuster, calling herself “conflicted” on the subject. If her debate performance catapults her into the top tier, she should consider further distinguishing herself from Warren and Sanders by stressing the importance of common ground to effectively govern in the Obama mold.

Democrats should not separate their love of Obama from how Obama governed. Obama may not have succeeded in ending our corrosive political polarization, but neither he did surrender to it. That’s a legacy all Democrats should be proud of defending, even if they never served as Obama’s vice president.