Michael Goodwin: I'm ignoring Biden's 'unity' talk, here's why you should, too

The joke survives the test of time and, under the circumstances, deserves repeating. As the late journalist Mickey Carroll told it, a suburban town with a population 90 percent Irish and 10 percent Jewish held a mayoral election involving two candidates — one Irish and one Jewish. 

The Irish candidate won with — wouldn’t you know it? — 90 percent of the vote. Whereupon he immediately denounced the clannishness of the Jews!

The story offers a useful way to view Joe Biden’s calls for national unity. Let’s just say our president is as sincere as the fictional Irish mayor.

Biden won the right to pursue the leftist agenda he campaigned on. But his promise that he will also work for the Americans who didn’t vote for him is more fig leaf than honest invitation. 

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As John Mitchell famously said about Richard Nixon’s White House, "Watch what we do, not what we say."

Applying that standard to Biden, we should ignore the unity talk because everything he has done leans far left.

Again, he’s entitled — elections have consequences. But knitting together a fractured America around a far-left agenda was never going to work. And Biden knows it.

In fact, his actions suggest the "Kumbaya" appeal is not directed at Trump voters or even the public in general. 

It’s really a disguised call to the factions in his own party to stick together, to give him a chance. I’ll keep you all happy, he’s saying, just watch. 

Biden kept Dems together during the campaign because everyone wanted to dump Trump.

Now that he’s won, he’s got to find other ways to keep the fault lines from widening. Early signs show he believes he can straddle the divide by staffing his administration with establishment veterans and party warhorses while giving the passionate far left early policy victories.

Their dogma lives loudly in the 25 or so executive orders the president signed as part of his promise to hit the ground running. He should have promised to walk. 

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Consider that just hours after the new president moaned in his inaugural address that "Millions of jobs have been lost, hundreds of thousands of businesses closed," he deliberately killed more jobs in the energy sector. 

One executive order revoked the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which snuffed out thousands of good-paying union jobs in Canada and the United States. The long-disputed project would have brought Canadian crude to Nebraska.

He halted new oil, gas and coal leases on public lands and water and rejoined the Paris climate accord, which is certain to be a massive jobs killer once he sets targets for reducing carbon emissions and enforces them with regulations. Naturally, the global climate elites cheered because, well, their jobs are secure.

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Trump’s policies on the pipeline and fuel exploration, along with pulling America out of the climate pact, succeeded at creating jobs and achieving energy independence. By reversing those policies, Biden keeps his promise to do the opposite of Trump.

The effective campaign tactic is economically disastrous as a governing principle. It’s not even clear the politics will work for long in his own party if he keeps killing jobs before creating any. 

History teaches that raising unemployment is a fast ticket to a short honeymoon.

There are other oddities as well. After months of trashing the Trump White House over its handling of the pandemic and the vaccine, Biden said Friday "there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months."

Lowering expectations is an old political trick, but his comment reflects a defeatist concession that can only deepen the nation’s funk.

Similarly, he said in his inaugural that America is both a great nation and systemically racist, which is hardly an uplifting message to a broad public. Then again, if you’re only appealing to wokesters and racial arsonists, the seeming incoherence makes sense. 

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Despite high unemployment and the pandemic, Biden invited Central American caravans to come on in. With a moratorium on deportations of illegal crossers, he made it certain the border will be flooded, and that criminals and the COVID-infected will be among them. His press secretary described the policy as contributing to "racial equity."

Biden also signed a radical order letting boys compete in girls’ sports events if they identify as transgender. The practice already is causing an uproar and now Biden has put the federal government on the side of glaring unfairness.

He rejoined the World Health Organization, which Trump accused of obscuring China’s role in spreading the coronavirus. So Biden will spend upwards of $450 million a year for the privilege of being the WHO’s largest donor — and we’ll never get the truth about what the organization knew and when it knew it. 

The conflicts and incoherence aside, the far left and media echo chambers swooned their approval of these and other measures, but that was predictable. The real test will come when Biden doesn’t have Trump to kick around anymore. 

If Dems and some Republicans have their way, that won’t be anytime soon. 

Impeachment 2.0 moves to the Senate this week when Nancy Pelosi transmits the House charge of "incitement of insurrection" regarding the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. While Biden has ducked questions about whether trying a former president is good for the country, his failure to object is all the answer we need. 

He’s on board and why not? As long as Trump is the target, Biden can keep his coalition intact. Trump is the best uniter Dems ever had. 

Indeed, with some Senate Republicans likely to vote for conviction, including possibly Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a dethroned Trump is spurring bipartisanship in Washington.

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Even if he is convicted and barred from public office, that won’t be the end of the Trump obsession. Pelosi, driven mad with hate, wants a commission to probe any Trump ties with Russia. 

At some point, however, the smoke will clear and voters will judge Biden on the merits of his own presidency. For some of us, that time began the moment he took office.

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