I’m going to skip the live presentation of the State of the Union and work on my new play.  I am sure there will be hours of recaps and analysis, and tomorrow is a school day.

Feel free to comment here with your thoughts.

Biden Being Biden — Susan Glasser in The New Yorker.

During a lifetime in politics, Joe Biden has delivered countless eulogies, many of them for Republican colleagues in the Senate. Over the years, he has eloquently laid to rest John McCain, of Arizona; William Roth, of Delaware; Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania; and even, controversially, the former segregationist Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina. He has delivered so many eulogies that the Times studied nearly sixty of them during the 2020 campaign, in search of insights into how Biden might lead the nation. On Wednesday, he took the Presidential motorcade up to Washington National Cathedral to bid goodbye to John Warner, the longest-ever-serving Republican senator from Virginia, who died last month, at the age of ninety-four.

Warner, though no liberal, had become a sharp critic of the Republican Party in the Trump era, and he endorsed Biden in last year’s election. Biden gratefully acknowledged that vote of confidence in his speech, a short, loving tribute not only to Warner but also to Biden’s favored political virtues of conscience, conviction, and consensus. The President hailed Warner’s “willingness to work across the aisle,” his “empathy” for those with whom he disagreed, and his abiding commitment to a vision of democracy that transcends differences rather than emphasizes them. “In the battle for the soul of America today,” Biden said, explicitly invoking the rhetoric of his recent campaign, “John Warner is a reminder of what we can do when we come together as one nation.”

But campaign season is over. This is Biden’s governing time, and even as he spoke on Wednesday it was very much an open question whether his promise of a return to bipartisan dealmaking would turn out to be anything other than a nostalgic prayer uttered in a cathedral. The answer came a few hours later, with the first, and so far only, major bipartisan breakthrough of Biden’s still-new Administration: a plan, negotiated by a group of ten senators—five Democrats and five Republicans—to advance a version of Biden’s sweeping infrastructure legislation, reduced to a not-quite-a-trillion-dollar package. If passed, it would be the largest infrastructure bill ever enacted. On Thursday morning, Biden called the negotiators to the White House. Less than an hour later, he emerged, grinning, and announced, “We had a really good meeting. We have a deal.”

After weeks of haggling, the deal had come together late on Wednesday. First, a direct channel between the Biden White House and Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator from West Virginia, designated by the G.O.P. leadership to hold talks, collapsed. Then a larger bipartisan group, nicknamed the G-10, stepped in, led by the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, and the Republican Rob Portman, of Ohio. (In classic Washington form, it being a city where everyone wants in on the action, the G-10 swelled to become the G-21 at one point in the negotiations.) Proposals and counterproposals and late-night pizza sessions ensued; even the arrival of the pizza boxes constituted news, as reporters waited to find out if Congress just might, maybe, still be able to do something big.

The central sticking point of the deal, which envisions more than five hundred billion dollars in new spending, was not how much to lay out for roads and bridges and tunnels and other “physical infrastructure” but, rather, the “pay-fors”—as in, how the government would pay for all the new spending. Republicans insisted on no change to corporate tax rates; the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats adamantly opposed proposals to index the gas tax or enact fees on electric vehicles. By Wednesday night, faced with the imminent deadline of a two-week Senate recess, the negotiators emerged with what looked like an agreement. “We have a framework,” Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, tweeted, shortly after 10 P.M. “Meeting at the White House tomorrow.” Seeking to reassure progressives who are increasingly wary of their more sweeping agenda being sold out by the White House, the Democrats’ House and Senate leaders made their own late-night announcement. The bipartisan infrastructure deal, they promised, would be acted on this summer only in parallel with a much costlier budget-reconciliation package that would include priorities of the left, such as child- and elder-care funding, which would be passed presumably with only Democratic votes. “We’re all on the same page,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said—although, even as he said it, it was fair to wonder whether this was more than a bit aspirational.

Democrats and Republicans were still cautious on Thursday, given the realities of a fifty-fifty Senate and a House in which the Democratic majority rests on only a handful of members. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would not take up the bipartisan infrastructure measure until the Senate passes both that bill and the budget reconciliation. “There ain’t gonna be no bipartisan bill unless we are going to have a reconciliation bill,” she said. “Plain and simple. In fact, I used the word ‘ain’t.’ ” In the Senate, Portman emerged from briefing Republican leaders without their commitment to support the deal, although he said that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was “open-minded.”

Biden certainly seemed to think that the votes would be there. After the short meeting with the G-10 senators on Thursday, the President announced the deal on the White House driveway, around 12:30 P.M. “This reminds me of the days we used to get an awful lot done in the Congress,” Biden said, putting his hand on Portman’s shoulder. Sounding a decidedly old-fashioned note of trust across party lines, he told reporters that “they’ve given me their word”—which, he added, “is good enough for me.” After Biden walked back into the White House, the senators picked up on his theme of nostalgia-tinged reverence for the virtues of across-aisle centrism. As Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican who often seemed to be a party of one in the latter days of the Trump Presidency, put it, “America works, the Senate works, and we can work together.” The other senators nodded their heads as he said it. “Hear! Hear!” some of them shouted.

A couple of hours later, Biden came out to meet the press again, for a more formal celebration in the East Room. As his staff circulated a fact sheet about the deal (a hundred and nine billion dollars for “roads, bridges, major projects”! Forty-nine billion for public transit! Seven and a half billion for electric buses!), the President declared the deal a boon for geopolitical relevance in the twenty-first century, one that “signals to ourselves and to the world that American democracy can deliver.” He also couldn’t resist the opportunity to lecture journalists about what he had learned during his nearly four decades in the Senate. “My party is divided but my party is also rational,” Biden said. “If they can’t get every single thing they want, but all that they have in the bill before them is good, are they going to vote no? I don’t think so.”

It all sounded so . . . normal. So much like how Washington used to work. But it’s a sign of where we are that what was once ordinary now ends up feeling like something profound: a breakthrough, a triumph, a history-defying retort to those who think the American system is broken beyond repair. Biden ran for office on the promise that rational centrism was not yet dead in the United States, conjuring a past and, possibly, a future in which Americans might still agree across party lines on some core values and shared projects. This infrastructure deal proves Biden’s theory of the case: that the elusive middle in American politics is alive, if often hardly in evidence. For that reason alone, this may go down as the biggest week so far of Biden’s Presidency.

Because, up until now, there has been almost no evidence to bolster Biden’s case. Congress has been so riven by extreme partisanship that it could not even agree to a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol. On Thursday, in fact, Pelosi announced, “with great solemnity and sadness,” a plan to appoint a House select committee on the insurrection, it being within her power to do so without the support of the Republican minority. Biden’s $1.9-trillion COVID-relief package received no Republican votes. And, although Thursday afternoon also produced an apparent breakthrough in talks on police reform, another Biden priority, it already appears that gridlock will prevail on many matters on which Biden hopes to make progress, such as gun control and—as a test vote in the Senate showed, earlier this week—voting rights.

For years, infrastructure has been the great bipartisan hope. Donald Trump so often claimed to be introducing—but inexplicably failed to follow through on—his own version of a two-trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that the promise of “Infrastructure Week” became one of the running jokes of his Administration. In Washington these days, it is a hard-and-fast conventional wisdom that, if Biden cannot achieve bipartisan agreement on infrastructure spending, he cannot do so on almost anything of consequence. This is the easy one; it will only get harder. But in truth this was not at all easy; anything beyond this may well be impossible. The habit of taking what you can get and then voting yes has all but vanished. Permanent outrage is Congress’s brand now, not perpetual compromise.

After Biden was done talking, I spoke with one of the Senate negotiators, the Democrat Mark Warner, of Virginia. He had joined the President at the National Cathedral to eulogize his late Republican colleague with the same last name (the two were not related), who not only forgave him for unsuccessfully running against him, in 1996, but eventually became his close friend. When we spoke on Thursday, Warner told me that the late senator had been on his mind during a heated moment at the negotiations, when he almost walked out of the talks. He had closed his binder and was about to leave, Warner said, when, “honest to goodness, I thought of what I’d said earlier in the day, that mantra of ‘What would John Warner do?’ Well, John Warner wouldn’t pack up his notebook and leave,” he told me. “So I reopened my notebook and went back to work.”

In Thursday’s meeting with Biden, Warner said, both he and the Republican Susan Collins, of Maine, brought up the funeral and the muscle memory that it had conjured for them of bipartisan deals past. Perhaps, they proposed, the bill should be named for the late Virginia senator, whose funeral service had helped to bring them together. The deal isn’t perfect, but it is real. And besides, as Warner pointed out to me, many of Biden’s infrastructure priorities in the deal “under Trump, Obama, and Bush never got a dime.” It’s not exactly what the President hoped for, he said, but it’s “not a bad day’s work,” either.

Doonesbury — Take Two.

My internet connection came back about an hour before President Biden’s speech last night, so I was able to watch it on the TV rather than listen to it on the radio, like I was planning to.  But in a way, I could have listened to it on the old Atwater-Kent because a lot of it harked back to the kind of speech that would have been given by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

No, I wasn’t around for FDR and his transformational plans and the New Deal; perhaps the closest I come would be Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society ideas such as Medicare, Head Start, and the civil rights legislation.  But last night President Biden brought back the sweeping ideas of his predecessors, proposing spending on programs that will help every American and their children.  Those along with his proposed investments in infrastructure and the foundations of what our country is built on are markedly different than plans put forward by recent Democratic presidents.  To counter both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, the era of big government is back, and government can be a part of the solution.

What a lot of people, including myself, didn’t expect was to see this kind of fire and passion from Joe Biden.

Josh Marshall:

I didn’t have great expectations for tonight’s speech because political events seldom turn on speeches. Nor is speechifying Biden’s forte. He’s workmanlike, solid. But he’s no great orator. That’s Barack Obama.

But I saw an extraordinarily effective speech. Like so much with Biden he managed to find in the historical moment things that play to his strengths. I’ve been watching State of the Union addresses for forty-plus years and I have never seen one like this. Biden delivered it with a tremendous informality. Biden is no Obama when it comes to oratory. But Obama couldn’t have delivered this speech. It would not play to his skills which are heroic and oratorical rather than empathic and conversational.

I’m curious how many times Biden departed from the prepared text. Because the delivery at least was deeply conversational. It frequently read like he was having a conversation with the people in the chamber and then, metaphorically at least, with the country at large. Perhaps it was just written to fall easily into Biden’s conversational style. But it had an informality and conversational tone that I haven’t seen any other President even attempt. It worked.

Biden continues to be blessed by the fact that late in life he rendezvoused with a political moment in which his personality and style, at other times a curiosities or even an obstacles, were uniquely suited to the moment.

[…]

Altogether, it was a powerful speech, potent in many ways because it was so understated, casual and conversational. Biden continues to bet big and in the strange alchemy of the moment, where essential elements of his public character seem to match the trauma of the moment, it seems to be working.

As we say in theatre, timing is everything. Had Joe Biden succeeded Barack Obama, I doubt that we would have seen such a dynamic attempt to change the direction and agenda of the country.  That’s because we wouldn’t have to; the Obama administration didn’t leave the carnage of divisiveness and corruption of Biden’s predecessor.  Any president who came after that would have to have taken such bold steps to stop the death spiral.

Franklin Roosevelt famously noted that “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”  That challenge is true for just about every generation: what choices we make for our future, our posterity, and our succeeding generations.  President Biden took that challenge and made it ours.  Now it is up to us to follow his lead.

The grown-ups are taking charge.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will nominate Pete Buttigieg to be secretary of transportation, Mr. Biden’s transition team announced Tuesday, selecting a former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former opponent who would bring a younger voice to the cabinet and add to its diversity as its first openly gay member.

[…]

President-elect Joseph R. Biden will nominate Jennifer M. Granholm, a former governor of Michigan and a longtime champion of renewable energy development, to be the next secretary of energy, according to four people close to the president-elect’s transition team.

If confirmed, Ms. Granholm, 61, will be the second woman, after Hazel R. O’Leary, who served under President Bill Clinton, to lead the vast department, which oversees the United States nuclear weapons complex as well as 17 national laboratories and a wide range of energy research and development initiatives.

I know some folks are wondering why Mayor Pete, with all his foreign policy interests, is given a post that sounds more like a backbench job. But since the country is in desperate need of infrastructure restoration starting with roads, bridges, and a rail system that hasn’t been upgraded since Harry Truman’s whistle-stop campaign in 1948, perhaps someone with civic experience could lead us there. Also, his foreign policy background would open the door to listening to ideas from places like Europe where they have outdone us in public transportation. Having him be the first openly gay cabinet member is just a nice plus.

The Electoral College has spoken.

It began at 10 a.m. in New Hampshire, where electors met in a statehouse chamber festooned with holiday decorations and gave their four votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. By noon on Monday, the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, ground zero for many of President Trump’s fruitless lawsuits, had backed Mr. Biden too. In New York, Bill and Hillary Clinton voted for Mr. Biden along with 27 other electors.

And when California cast its 55 votes for Mr. Biden around 5:30 p.m. Eastern time, it pushed him past the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, putting the official seal on his victory after weeks of efforts by Mr. Trump to use legal challenges and political pressure to overturn the results.

With the Electoral College vote behind him, Mr. Biden called for unity while forcefully denouncing the president and his allies for their assault on the nation’s voting system. In an address in Wilmington, Del., on Monday night, he said the Republican efforts to get the Supreme Court to undo the result represented a “position so extreme we’ve never seen it before,” and called the attacks on election officials at the local level “unconscionable.”

Here’s his speech.

What’s inside the blue bag on front porches all over America this morning.

Our Better Angels — Charles P. Pierce.

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.

—King Lear, Act IV, Scene 2

At the moment, we have a president*.

In a few months, it appears, we will have a president.

The asterisk is dead. May god have mercy on its soul.

I stayed up until 5 a.m. on Friday morning, just long enough for Joe Biden to pass El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago in the remarkable state of Georgia, and he did so with votes from Clayton County, the late John Lewis’ old congressional district. I was asleep when Pennsylvania finally flipped after the sun came up. I did what every true American patriot has done all week—curse the Electoral College for murdering sleep—and realized that I’m going to be working against muscle memory every time I type the word “president” for quite some time. I apologize to President-Elect Biden in advance in case I occasionally drop the asterisk out of habit, until I get used to the idea that this president* and his awful family and his terrible administration* are vapor.

Joe Biden has come through a lot of history, and not unscathed, either. I applied to be one of his speechwriters in 1976, fresh out of college. (I didn’t get the gig, which is why he hasn’t built his library already.) Since then, he’s run for president three times. In 1988, he was sunk by a plagiarism scandal brought to light by operatives in the employ of Michael Dukakis. (When Mike Dukakis oppo’s you out of a race, it’s like losing a fistfight with Plato.) In 2008—Twenty years later!—he was swept aside by the phenomenon of Barack Obama, of whom he memorably once said,

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

And this is why campaign aides jump out of windows.

Obama, of course, held no grudges and, by picking Biden as a running mate, revived his career as cool Uncle Joe, one of the more remarkable charisma transfusions in the history of American politics. There is no question that Biden was transformed by the vice presidency, making him the first vice president to be elevated rather than minimized by that office, at least without the president’s having died. The gaffe-ridden friend of the Delaware financial-services industry slipped on the aviators, unleashed his killer smile, and found his way back to being the decent guy, friend of the Amtrak commuters, damn fine Dad, that everybody who really knew him always said he was. The guy who choked so badly during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings was sent to wrangle votes for a stimulus deal and the Affordable Care Act, and generally was one of the great wingmen any president ever had.

So, when he announced he was running for president again—32 years later!—and when he said he was doing so to recapture the soul of America, people bought it. Even when he barely crawled through the primary processes in Iowa and New Hampshire, he clung to that message—that we are somehow better than the president* we had elected in 2016, that the better angels of our nature were not taking a few years off. The message found an audience as soon as the primary electorate became less Caucasian, especially in South Carolina, where Congressman Jim Clyburn pointed the way. At which point, the country’s simple desire for cool and blessed normality asserted itself. I freely admit that I underestimated the political salience of that simple truth.

Events then conspired to intensify that desire. The pandemic hit in the middle of the year and the economy cratered as a result. The most intense racial upheaval since the 1960s struck with the murder of George Floyd. Biden stayed resolutely on message—that, basically, we have it in us to make it all OK. There was a brilliant jiu-jitsu element to that message. It insulated Biden from being firmly tagged with any rioting and looting that went on. It absorbed every episode of angry lunacy emanating from the White House as validation of its basic raison d’être. We can survive even the president* that we have inflicted upon ourselves, the message was. There is no crisis that Americans cannot overcome, not even each other. In all honesty, the truth of that message is still very much up in air; one thing that the 2020 election has proven is that the 2016 election wasn’t anywhere near the outlier that a lot of people wanted it to be. But, simply as a reason to vote for someone, it was both extraordinarily powerful and just barely enough.

---

SICINIUS: What is the city but the people?

CITIZENS: True, the people are the city.

BRUTUS: By the consent of all, we were establish’d the people’s magistrates.

—Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1.

Citizens of the following cities saved the American republic: Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and (possibly) Phoenix.

Remember these names: Stacey Abrams of Georgia, Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, Jane Fleming Kleeb of Nebraska. They saved the American Republic.

Black voters saved the American republic.

Women voters saved the American republic.

Over 70 million American citizens saved the American republic.

The late Congressman Elijah Cummings left behind the question for us all to answer:

When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked: “In [2019], what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?” Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?

Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States.

Kamala Harris is the 49th Vice President of the United States.

At the moment, another verse from Seamus Heaney, whom Biden used as a kind of unofficial speechwriter throughout this long, weird year, seems appropriate to the occasion, to the election of a president-elect for whom fatherhood has been both glory and deep, unhealed wound, something that touched a country desperate for the kind of solace that Joe Biden brought home from Washington every night on the Acela to his bereaved sons back in Wilmington.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

Doonesbury — Shearing the sheep.