Beltway Brain is a horrible disease

Is our Playbook learning? Absolutely not:

HOW SERIOUS IS BIDEN ABOUT BIPARTISANSHIP? We’re about to find out. Today, 10 Senate Republicans will make a counteroffer to Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan and meet with the president to discuss their idea. It’s expected to total about $600 billion, less than a third of Biden’s proposal. But will the president actually entertain it, and counter the counter?

Note how the onus for “bipartisanship” is placed entirely on Biden, although the Republicans (who lost control of the Senate despite the odds being massively stacked in their favor) made a counter-offer Politico concedes is a feeble poison pill.

This is even more telling:

Some Biden advisers are starting to argue that Biden can pass the bipartisan test without Republican votes. You read that right. “Even with narrow majorities in Congress, [Biden] has the opportunity to build broad bipartisan support for his program — not necessarily in Congress but with the American people,” ANITA DUNN told John Harwood in a piece for CNN over the weekend.

The combination of incredulity and contempt for the idea that the preferences of voters could be a meaningful consideration is pretty much the definitive manifestation of Beltway Pundit Brain. Indeed, to this crowd you prove your BIPARTISAN mettle by going out of your way to do things that aren’t popular.

Fortunately, Senate Dems seem to be telling the losing party that is plainly not negotiating in good faith to piss up a rope, which gives them another chance to have a sad:

So far the answer looks like no. And some moderate Republicans are privately expressing disappointment that Biden hasn’t done more to hold Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER and Speaker NANCY PELOSI back from plowing ahead with reconciliation. One of them told us Sunday afternoon that Biden says “all this great stuff about unity, but it’s like that old Wendy’s commercial: ‘Where’s the beef?’”

Somebody should develop some kind of pithy “law” to describe the widespread assumption of Beltway hacks that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics. (Also “moderate” Republicans LOL.)