With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Senate Republicans involved with infrastructure talks spent this past week trying to cleave President JOE BIDEN from the rest of the White House. Time and again, they insisted that Biden was not just more amenable to cutting a deal than his top aides, but that he’d indicated he’d accept an offer well short of what his administration was proposing. For liberal Biden skeptics, this likely caused a bad case of deja vu. Republicans, after all, have effectively used the isolate-Biden tactic before. The most prominent case came at the end of 2012, when the parties were hammering out a deal around the fiscal cliff: a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes scheduled to take place absent legislative action. After painstaking negotiations, then-Senate Majority Leader HARRY REID made it clear to then-Senate Minority Leader MITCH McCONNELL that his last offer would be his final one. So what did McConnell do? He went directly to Biden. “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” he asked the vice president. As McConnell hoped, Biden accepted the challenge. With President BARACK OBAMA’s sign off, he hammered out a compromise that extended much of the Bush tax cuts, prolonged sequestration for a few months and extended unemployment insurance. McConnell later claimed he got 99 percent of what he wanted on the tax cut front. Had that been the first such deal between the two, liberals wouldn’t have been so apoplectic. But two years earlier, Biden had cut another one with McConnell that extended all of the Bush tax cuts for two years (which, in turn, set up that fiscal cliff). Shortly after that, Biden went to the McConnell Center in Kentucky — named after its political benefactor, the senator—where he lavished praise on the minority leader as a man of “sincerity and intellectual grounding” who understood “the necessity of finding common ground in a nation as heterogeneous as ours.” Progressives haven’t forgotten this history , but it wasn’t a — pardon the pun — deal breaker in the 2020 presidential race. And, in reality, Biden’s reputation as a guy nostalgic for compromise likely served him well electorally. All of which made the start of his administration so surprising. Biden quickly dispensed with bipartisan negotiations around Covid-relief legislation, Democrats hailed the dawn of a postmodern Bidenism, and everyone agreed that the lessons of the Obama years had been learned. But as seems evident this week, Biden remains drawn to the pursuit of political compromise. A new GOP counteroffer on infrastructure presented today falls hundreds of billions of dollars below his proposal, doesn’t fund key Democratic initiatives and relies on pay-fors that the president has said he won’t accept. But, Biden announced the White House will extend talks between the parties into next week. The question is, to what end? Biden also said talks needed to close down soon. And CHRIS JENNINGS, who was one of the lead negotiators for the Obama White House on health care reform, said the president is not some rube about modern political realities. In fact, he said, Biden probably understands the multi-dimensional elements of legislative negotiations better than most; that sometimes you need to talk with Republicans in order to win over conservative Democrats; that there are psychological and political benefits from the perception that you were not the person or party to abandon the negotiating table. “He sees the benefits of bipartisanship and the benefits of the process of it,” Jennings told West Wing Playbook. “But I don't think he is paralyzed by it…. He’s not going to be held hostage if he feels progress is needed.” And yet, Jennings also acknowledged that Biden — like virtually all lawmakers — has an inflated sense of his own abilities to forge compromise. On that front, the president isn’t exactly hiding the ball. In his 2007 book “Promises to Keep,” Biden recalled how Senate Majority Leader MIKE MANSFIELD told him, early upon his election to Congress, that he shouldn’t attack the motives of JESSE HELMS, one of Senate’s most infamous racists, or others with whom he disagreed. “It’s probably the single most important piece of advice I got in my career,” Biden wrote (emphasis, ours). “To this day,” he added, “if I need help on an issue I really care about, it’s not always enough to bring along my political allies; sometimes I need the support of people who fundamentally disagree with me on 80 percent of the questions we decide.” PSA — We’re going to be experimenting with some new items and sections. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you JOSH HSU? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. You can also reach Alex and Theo individually. | 
