Bipartisan Biden

Biden aims to use the State of the Union speech to position himself as bipartisan

Feb 06, 2023

Welcome to Unbiased NYT. Everyday we annotate The Morning, a free newsletter from the NYT to provide context and point out ways they manipulate every day readers with biased writing and opinions that they present as facts.

Today the NYT covers the upcoming State of the Union address. They come with advanced information from Biden’s closest advisors about the goal of the speech: to position the Biden administration as bipartisan moving forward now that Republicans are in control of the House. Let’s get into it.

NYT: “President Biden probably will not put it quite this way when he gets up before Congress to address the nation this week, but the state of America’s union is disunion. To see that, he will need only turn around to find a Republican House speaker seated behind him, determined to block his every move.”

uNYT: The opposing House speaker seated behind the President during the State of the Union is usually determined to block the President’s agenda. Don’t forget when then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up the State of The Union address on national television while sitting behind Trump. Pelosi spent four years doing everything in her power to block Trump’s agenda. This is unfortunately how the game is now played in Washington.

NYT: “So Mr. Biden’s message of unity, a hard sell already during his first two years in office, may prove even more out of sync on Tuesday night as he delivers his first State of the Union address of this new era of divided government. Yet for a president who prides himself on working across the aisle, a unity pitch may paradoxically be a useful cudgel to hammer his newly empowered opponents.”

uNYT: Since when has President Biden spread a message of unity and bipartisanship? Aside from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he’s spent the last two years attacking Republicans - including comments as recent as January 26 when he labeled Republicans as the party of ‘chaos and catastrophe’.

The NYT is painting Biden as a peacemaker looking to reach across the aisle to work with Republicans. They’re laying the groundwork to label the Republican House as far-right radicals who are unwilling to work with Democrats on bipartisan legislation for the next two years. But so far, we haven’t seen much peace talk from Biden, he’s still on the attack.

/end

NYT: The Morning Newsletter is below for context

Good morning. After a four-month book leave, I’m looking at what changed during that time.

Ukrainian soldiers firing into a Russian-controlled town in eastern Ukraine last month.Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Seven surprises

This is my first newsletter after a four-month book leave, and I want to try something a little different. As I prepared to come back, I spent time talking with Times colleagues and outside experts about how the world has changed while I was gone.

Which news developments will have lasting import? What has been surprising? What do we know now that we didn’t before?

As I was making the list, I realized that it would be worth sharing it with readers. It helps give some perspective to a dizzying news environment in which all of us struggle to distinguish between stories that are ephemeral and those with lasting significance. During a cynical time in American life, the list also offers a reminder that there has been good news along with the bad.

In descending order of significance — and, yes, this ranking is subjective and weighted toward the U.S. — here are the seven biggest stories of the past few months.

The list

7. A.I. arrives. Artificial intelligence felt theoretical to many people until November, when OpenAI, a technology company in San Francisco, released ChatGPT. Since then, millions of Americans have experimented with the software or read some of its output.

“ChatGPT is still young — only 2 months old! — and yet we’re already getting a glimpse of the many ways these A.I. chatbots could change our lives,” my colleague Kevin Roose says. Some of the implications seem scary: A.I. can write a solid college essay. Other implications are exciting: Surely, a computer can learn to write more comprehensible instructions for many household gadgets than is the norm today.

6. A milder Covid winter. In each of the past two winters, the country endured a terrible surge of severe Covid illnesses, but not this winter.

Chart shows a seven-day daily average. | Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

It’s a sign that the virus has become endemic, with immunity from vaccinations and previous infections making the average Covid case less severe. If anything, the best-known Covid statistics on hospitalizations and deaths probably exaggerate its toll, because they count people who had incidental cases. Still, Covid is causing more damage than is necessary — both because many Americans remain unvaccinated and because Covid treatments are being underused, as German Lopez has explained.

5. Milder inflation, too. The pace of consumer price increases has declined more in recent months than most economists expected. Why? The pandemic’s supply-chain disruptions have eased, and the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases are starting to have their intended effect. “Inflation is still very elevated, so it’s not mission accomplished for the Fed by any means,” said Jeanna Smialek, an economics correspondent based in Washington, “but we are finally headed in the right direction.”

It remains unclear whether the Fed can engineer the soft landing — reducing inflation further without causing a recession — that is its goal. The strong job market captured in Friday’s employment report suggests that the economy may still be running hot enough to require significantly higher interest rates.

4. Peak China? China’s ruling Communist Party has had a rough few months. It abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy in December, effectively acknowledging a huge failure (without actually acknowledging it). Weeks later, China released data showing that its population had peaked, which creates a major economic challenge. The number of workers relative to retirees will be declining for the foreseeable future.

Of course, China has long been preparing for this challenge and has defied repeated predictions of looming decline in recent decades, my colleague Max Fisher points out. It would be a mistake to assume that decline has now begun. But Xi Jinping’s government will need to do a better job of managing the situation than it has of managing the pandemic.

(The spy balloon isn’t hugely significant on its own, but it adds to the sense that Beijing’s competence has been exaggerated. Here’s the latest.)

3. The final days of affirmative action. When the Supreme Court heard arguments about race-based affirmative action in October, the six Republican-appointed justices seemed ready to ban it. A ruling is expected by June.

One big question is how colleges, the military and other organizations will try to replace the current programs. A focus of this newsletter in 2023 will be the future of class-based affirmative action. It is unquestionably legal, yet many colleges do relatively little to take into account economic class, as measured by income, wealth, neighborhood conditions and more. There are large racial gaps in those indicators.

2. Russia’s miscalculation. The overall situation in Ukraine has remained similar since late last year: Russia controls parts of the east and the south, but far less than its strategic goals, and both sides are hoping for a breakthrough soon. Elsewhere, though, the war has shifted geopolitics.

Japan and western Europe have been spooked enough by Russia’s invasion to increase their military spending after years of largely outsourcing military power to the U.S. If the trend continues, the global alliance of democracies will be strengthened. And the U.S. might be able to shift some of its own military spending to invest in technologies of the future.

Donald Trump and Kari Lake during her campaign for governor of Arizona in 2022.Rebecca Noble for The New York Times

1. Democracy won. The biggest surprise of the past four months to me was the defeat of nearly every major election denier who was on the ballot this year. “A critical segment of the electorate is not interested in Trumpism,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, said.

Nate estimated that Trump-aligned candidates performed about five percentage points worse than other Republicans, with the effects seeming to be largest in states where Trump tried to overturn the 2020 result, like Arizona and Pennsylvania. It happened even as many other conservative Republicans fared well.

That is a big deal. A democracy can survive intense policy disagreements over taxes, government benefits, abortion, affirmative action and more. But if the true winner of a major election is prevented from taking office, a country is not really a democracy anymore.

What’s missing

I recognize this list omits several important subjects on which the big picture has not changed much lately. The planet keeps warming. The U.S. immigration system is a mess. Police violence has continued. Crime, though down slightly, is far above its pre-Covid levels. We will cover all these stories — and any promising solutions — in 2023.

Give us feedback: What did I overlook, and what other stories do you want us to cover this year?

Can you tell the difference between text written by A.I. and text written by a fourth grader? Play our game.
I learned a lot from Ezra Klein’s recent podcast with Yuen Yuen Ang in which she described how Xi Jinping ended China’s era of reformist policy.
Times photographers are documenting the war in Ukraine. See their latest work.

THE LATEST NEWS

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Searching for survivors in Turkey today.Ilyas Akengin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Politics

President Biden plans to call for bipartisanship tomorrow in his first State of the Union address since Republicans took the House.
The Chinese balloon incident shows how little Washington and Beijing communicate, The Times’s David Sanger writes.
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