Today's Playbook Audio Brief is brought to you by United Health Group.

Good Thursday morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to your Politico Playbook Audio Briefing.

And I'm Jake Sherman. Joe Biden has an incredibly ambitious legislative agenda.

He wants to rework the nation's health care laws, fund infrastructure, and pass a new round of coronavirus relief.

That all sounds well and good, but there's one massive and familiar complication,

Mitch McConnell.

Biden, Joe knows Congress, said repeatedly during the campaign that he thought when he beat

Donald Trump, the fog would lift and Republicans would see the light of bipartisanship.

Maybe they will, but at this point,

that doesn't seem obvious. A large pocket of the Senate Republican conferences behind Trump in his quest to challenge the election results, and few will even acknowledge the reality

that Biden has won the election. We asked McConnell on Wednesday about his relationship with Biden,

much ballihood by some on the left and Biden himself.

McConnell had just answered a separate question, but when we asked about Biden, he stopped on a dime,

stared up in an elevator, and gazed at it as if it were a Picasso.

Seconds later, he got in that elevator and went on with his day, leaving his thoughts about Biden unanswered.

Pool reporters in Delaware Wednesday asked Biden why he hadn't spoken to McConnell.

Here's the pool report.

There's a lot going on, though it was unclear to me whether he was responding to the McConnell

question or explaining why he wasn't stopping to take questions.

Biden did find time to talk to Nancy Pelosi to congratulate her on winning an internal party election that she won unanimously.

If he is majority leader, swaying McConnell, of course, is almost certainly the key to Biden's success.

And Democrats have made a good habit of losing to him in the last half dozen years.

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