Give Joe a break: Talking about compromise is smart

So it’s good politics to praise the value of compromise. As Vox’s Jane Coaston has argued on “The Weeds” podcast, Biden is effectively invoking the political style, if not the actual governing agenda, of centrism. “It’s not so much that he is appealing to centrism,” Coaston said. “He’s appealing to the idea of centrism, and the idea of centrism is very popular.”

Plus, Biden is hardly the only Democratic candidate engaging in wishful thinking. Bernie Sanders’s claim that a “political revolution” will force Republicans to accept some of his ideas is also fanciful, as the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out. “Telling polite fictions is good politics,” Bernstein writes in Bloomberg Opinion.

Whoever the next Democratic president is, he or she will need a strategy for dealing with Republican intransigence. But publicly ruling out the idea of compromise, almost a year and a half before the next election, doesn’t count as a strategy. All good politicians engage in a mix of realism and aspiration.