Obama believed he was charming (haha sorry mr. Kenyan Muslim you can't charm everyone) and popular (you basically disbanded your movement, dumbass, nobody cares what David Brooks thinks of you) and compromising (true!) enough that he could get Republicans to join him in a glorious bipartisan American empire. Biden thinks that because his good Republican friends never shivved him in the Senate locker room (and because he'll give them almost everything they want) that he'll succeed where his best friend, Barack Obama, failed, for reasons he never quite explains (clang).
I don't think the audience for bipartisan fetishism is what it was, but I will grant it did have an audience once upon a time. But if politicians spouting it didn't believe their own bullshit, it might be reasonable campaign rhetoric. Too many of them do believe it, and when the rhetoric fails (hi Claire!) to get them elected they believe, "oh, well, Republicans would vote for me but AOC and some mean people online turned them off." That excuse is hilarious, but even if it's *true* that it's hard to run a bipartisan fetish campaign when the entire rest of the country isn't precisely on message with you, then perhaps it just isn't a viable strategy. You can't shush the meanies on the internet. Just the way things are.
