saying, i m more patriotic than you are, you re not american, and yet these are the people overturning the constitution, creating an act of insurrection at the capitol, going and visit autocrats in autocrat countries. meanwhile, the republicans who demanded 33 hearings on benghazi don t want to have one hearing on a domestic event with more life loss when you include the suicides than benghazi. it is such an important point. michael shearer, i understand from some of my conversations that president biden is deeply pained by what he saw on january 6th and that it really just is his commitment to running a message-disciplined white house focused on the covid relief package, focused on infrastructure that keeps him from speaking out in such stark terms that we heard yesterday. what is your understanding of sort of the under-the-surface concerns about anti-democratic
european dictator. how do they navigate governing a country that is drawn to that? well, look, i think and i was on that trip in europe with the president when he went a couple of months ago, and i think they are relying on a kind of sense of normalcy that they think is sort of the world is snapping back to. that s not to say that they, you know, misunderstand or play down the disinformation that s out there. they certainly understand the power of fox news and they understand that, you know, donald trump has followers in the united states and there are equally, you know, equal numbers of like minded people around the world. but i think, you know, they have a kind of central optimism, operating principle, optimism that the country kind of is beginning or the world, frankly, is looking beyond that and that, you know, the president always says those
irredeemably awful. after biden was elected, the two-track pattern was still going strong. the circus realm gave us the horror of january 6th, but the governing part of america carried on. the biden administration has moved to separate government from the culture wars. it shifted power away from the green new deal and freedom caucus show horses and lodged it with the congressional workhorses, people like republican rob portman and democrat mark warner, who are in no danger of becoming social media stars. american politics is in god-awful shape, but we re seeing a reasonably successful attempt to build it back better. we re back with jon meacham. we should mention, as he mentioned, occasionally advises president biden. mark mckinnon is here as well. jon meacham, david brooks arrives at almost the exact conclusion that you sort of displayed for us about what he was trying to do. how do you sustain that? it is the great question
and others for a rude question from someone like tim russert or someone that was going to probe them. let me ask you the rude q & a, jon meacham. sure. i accept all of that as true. it is also true through no fault of his own joe biden has now presided on the biggest roll back of access to the right to vote in modern american history. why isn t or if his hair is on fire, why don t we see it? well, it seems to me that to say he has presided over it is a little rough. he s been president. he didn t do it. he has been president while this country has seen the largest rollback in access to the polls in modern history, in this generation. right. so you have to so as we re celebrating the anniversary today, what you have to do is find the right role for the federal government to step into this constitutional question, which is that the states have the autonomy on this.
can protect our most vulnerable. who are we when we fail in that critical responsibility? you know, nick, i miss dr. wen because she s so blunt, but this does seem to be the diagnosis that the white house has made of this country as well, that they re not sacrificing another school year, that the communities where the adults have become vaccinated are directly correlated to the communities where the schools will be safest. look, the fact that, as we have seen reported, the biden administration is considering withholding funding, for example, from institutions that don t do a vaccine mandate just shows you what the stakes are here, right? vaccines and masks equal jobs and growth, that s it. and the biggest obstacle for the biden administration both substantively and politically are people who don t want to get the vaccine. it s going to kill the recovery.