The Paradox of Joe Biden: A Cold-Blooded Look

I can state the paradox of Joe Biden in four sentences. Everyone frets about his age. But the experience that comes with age has made him the most successful and productive president I ever got to vote for, and I’m 78. He’s far from a brilliant orator; he lacks “charisma.” But he also lacks the “buzz” and notoriety and of an ex-president who beat two impeachment raps and is facing 91 felony counts, and the “attractions” of such worthless grandstanders as Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Jim Jordan and Kyrsten Sinema.

So what do we Americans want—a guy who knows his job and gets things done, big time, a leader who’s entertaining and endlessly fascinating because he’s as dangerous as a rattlesnake curled up and rattling, or someone like Putin, Kim, Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini? Do we Americans share the same character flaw that led several nations down the garden path to despotism and ruin? Only time will tell.

When it comes to assessing actual accomplishments, the race is not even close. No president since FDR or Harry Truman (with his Marshall Plan and desegretating the Army) has done as much as Joe Biden to maintain and improve democracy, equality and the lives of ordinary Americans. In JFK’s short presidency, he helped save the world from nuclear Armageddon and began the race to the Moon, which LBJ later won. If LBJ had focused on his Great Society and his miraculous civil rights laws, he might have surpassed Biden’s feats; but he didn’t. He escalated the War in Vietnam into a major global conflict—the single most catastrophic blunder in our nation’s foreign policy and a permanent blot on our national escutcheon. In so doing, LBJ destroyed much that he had worked so hard to create at home, as MLK brilliantly predicted a year before his own assassination.

Obama was an immensely talented and popular president. But his main accomplishments were so-called Obamacare and successfully withstanding a shameful avalanche of bald racism and political hazing that Mitch McConnell, the late Rush Limbaugh and eventually the entire Republican Party (except, belatedly, John McCain) dumped on him. Obama could have done much more if treated like any other president, but history is history.

In comparison, Biden’s list of major accomplishments is breathtaking. Together with the lamely named “Inflation Reduction Act,” Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act gave us the largest investment in fighting our species’ primary (and accelerating!) existential threat—global warming—of any nation in human history. It also began fixing a woefully dilapidated national infrastructure that had been dramatically brought to our national attention at least fourteen years before and that no one, including Biden’s immediate predecessor, had even managed even to begin to fix.

As a mere sidelight, the Inflation Reduction Act has begun the long process of letting ordinary people in America afford the miracle drugs that our pharmaceutical giants make, and that have often been priced out of many patients’ reach. The so-called “Chips Act” is beginning a long struggle to bring a little of our key manufacturing back from China, where our oligarchs sold it for profit, to our own shores. And it does so in an absolutely key industry that we Americans invented.

That’s not all. Biden pushed through hundreds of billions of dollars in relief, for corporations, small businesses, and ordinary people, allowing our economy to survive a pandemic that hit us much harder than it had to because Republicans and their demagogues, including Donald Trump, disputed and ridiculed science and got many people to refuse their vaccines, their masks and pills that work. With careful nudging and a dogged refusal to overreact, Biden has navigated the shoals of our pandemic slowdown and inflation and brought us the lowest employment and strongest job recovery in half a century, against all fears of a recession that hasn’t happened.

But that’s still not all. With a single exception—the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, which was pre-committed by his predecessor—Biden’s foreign-policy achievements have been as impressive as his domestic ones. He has brought together a national and international coalition to fight Russia’s abomination in Ukraine, in the process holding the line against a new nuclear-backed imperialism. He has steeled NATO and the Western alliances generally, overcoming the doormat-to-Putin policies of his predecessor. He’s now in the process of creating a global alliance of democracies and democratic-leaning nations, including two of the strongest, our old enemies Germany and Japan. He’s even trying to get fence-sitting India, now the world’s most populous nation, on board.

How did Biden do all this, in a mere 2.5 years in office, and in the face of the most over-the-top, blind political opposition since our Civil War? He did it by knowing his job. He did it by knowing people.

Politics is not entertainment. It’s not show business, as so many current American pols and voters seems to believe. It’s about people.

It’s about getting good things done by knowing how they think, what they want, what motivates them, and, yes, what they fear. With over half a century of experience in politics, Biden knows how to deal with, work with, and, yes, out-think, national and international leaders of all kinds. His latest State-of-the-Union speech, in which he snookered his opposition into (reluctantly) declaring their support for Social Security and Medicare, was just the tip of the iceberg. Biden knows how to get things done because he knows the people who have their hands on the levers, plus those standing in his way, better than any leader in any democracy on the planet.

So why would any sane American want to give up Joe Biden for a new, untested leader who could easily lose to our Demagogue and thus lose our democracy? If you want entertainment, try streaming services or Tik-Tok. If you want good government and an American renaissance, stick with the guy who’s delivered because he has a half-century of solid experience and knows his stuff.

Oh, and did I mention that, amongst all the inveterate liars and grifters like the Demagogue and George Santos, the ranters and ravers, the over-the-top furies like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the “look at me!” performance artists like Ted Cruz and Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Biden still epitomizes the political virtues of practicality, mutual respect, human decency and basic morality? Maybe that explains why he can still get things done in today’s topsy-turvy political world. Why would anyone want to abandon his calm, steady, decent, soothing leadership for today’s perpetually raging wildfires of the soul?

In closing, let me say the unsayable. Biden could die. He could have a stroke. He could become incapacitated. Any of those misfortunes would be a catastrophe not just for the Biden family, but for the nation and the world. It would be all the worse if it happened before next year’s presidential election.

But if the worst occurred, what would happen? The Democratic Party and the nation would try to find a substitute for Biden among the Democrats who, even now, are, quite properly, refusing to challenge him for the nomination. There would be an unseemly scramble among people who aren’t yet ready for prime time in the White House and know it.

So why, pray tell, would we want to accelerate that unseemly scramble, bringing it forward into the present, when Biden, albeit perhaps slowing down a bit, is very much alive and in full possession of his faculties, his knowledge of people, his experience and his skill?

We have a winner and a great leader who happens to be old and not a great entertainer. To children of YouTube, he may be “boring,” but many children of YouTube are too young to know the agony that “exciting” chaos can bring. He’s done the most for us of any president in my long lifetime, and he’s still got his mojo. Why would we want to accelerate the chaos and uncertainty that would attend his death or disability before either actually happens?

And anyway, who’s better placed to choose our A-team and, if need be, Biden’s successor? The now-demented and traitorous GOP? Those voters who can’t see the difference between a skilled and productive leader and a wily but psychotic entertainer? Or Biden himself, and his A-team, while he and they still have it?

If you put your faith in history, achievement and skill, there is only one answer to these questions. And it’s not an invitation to a political free-for-all. It’s reliance on past history. “Stick with the winner” is the best advice that anyone can give Democrats today. Jim Clyburn, another wise and experienced pol who is no great orator, and who put Biden back on the path to victory in 2020, would understand.

At the end of the day, it’s not just our right-wing opponents who have trouble accepting reality. They can’t seem to accept the facts that their Dear Leader is a traitor, a bully, a psychopath/sociopath, a criminal many times over, a cruel tyrant-in-waiting, and—in his inability to conceive practical solutions to real problems (his Wall, bleach and ivermectin, for example)—a moron. But we progressives have trouble facing reality, too. We can’t seem to accept the fact that our current president’s long-honed talents, although not obvious to all, make him the best and most productive political leader our nation has had in at least half a century.

If we can just accept those facts, keep him in place, and bolster his bench and his backup, wouldn’t we be making the best with what we have, rather than wringing our hands and throwing it all away on a half-baked, risky strategy? And, if so, isn’t that how smart people make the best of their inevitably imperfect lives?


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