Biden lawyer Bob Bauer in "The Unraveling": Democracy crisis will outlast Trump
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Cover: Rowman & Littlefield
Bob Bauer, personal attorney to President Biden and former White House counsel to President Obama, argues in a book out Tuesday that it's wrong to see the crisis for democracy "as beginning and ending with Trump and assume that his departure from the national stage will allow the corner to be decisively turned."
Why it matters: "The crisis of democratic politics is a crisis of public faith in politics," Bauer writes in "The Unraveling." "To restore faith in government, the role of politics has to be defended."
- Jon Meacham writes in an introduction that you "may disagree with Bob Bauer's politics but still be grateful for his devotion to the principles for which he is fighting — principles that would make American politics not an occasion for total war but a realm in which we debate differences, live with ambiguity, and resolve what we can."
Zoom in: In Bauer's book, billed as "part memoir, part rumination," he argues that "political actors know the difference between good and bad politics."
- "Bad politics is rationalized easily enough: blood sport, or the other side started it first, or the goal is winning and so very sorry about that, but we did what we had to do," Bauer writes. "But politicians, and their aides and advisers, know the critical difference between the good and the bad."
Bauer has a warning for Democrats and progressives who want to "pack" the Supreme Court:
- Two "can play the norm-busting game: it is intolerable that one side would allow the other to play it and not answer in kind."
Go deeper: "How a 'Committed Partisan Warrior' Came to Rethink the Political Wars," by N.Y. Times' Peter Baker (gift link).
