Is Biden's outreach to Republicans real?

It’s early in the term, but the White House seems to be deploying a model in which Biden consciously plays the good cop while tacitly allowing his staff to play the bad cop. Biden is innately suited to the role, and it also gives him cover when the administration takes a more hard-line stand. When Republicans complain that Democrats are “jamming” the relief package through Congress, they often don’t blame Biden. They point to his staff or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, contending that they’re the ones pushing the president to steamroll the opposition. Collins mentioned that when she looked around the Oval Office during the February 1 meeting, she saw Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, sitting in the back of the room and shaking his head when Republicans made the case for a smaller bill. Biden, she told reporters at an informal press gaggle in the Capitol, “was very attentive, gracious, and into the details. It was a great discussion.” But Klain’s body language, she said, “was not exactly an encouraging sign.”

As one might expect, White House officials deny that there is anything to the good-cop, bad-cop model. “He’s the president, and the staff is executing the strategy at his direction,” Ricchetti told me. “He wants this outreach. He wants this dialogue. He has the absolute expectation that even in disagreement on issues of substance that it will be done respectfully and courteously.”