Biden the latest ‘crisis president’
At the end of October, for the last big speech of his White House campaign, Joe Biden travelled to Warm Springs, Georgia, where Franklin D Roosevelt went to recuperate from the polio that disabled him during his presidency.
FDR was the Democratic predecessor who heaved America out of the Great Depression with the New Deal.
Yet Biden focused less on FDR’S political history than his most personal one, of suffering, resilience and healing, recalling the rehabilitation community set up there, allowing the disabled to live dignified lives.
‘‘FDR came looking for a cure but it was the lessons he learnt here that he used to lift a nation,’’ Biden said. ‘‘Humility, empathy, courage, optimism. This place represented away forward. A way of restoration, of resilience, of healing.’’
As he took his oath of office yesterday, Biden joined the pantheon of America’s crisis presidents, leaders who took office at emergency moments in history, seeking to steer the country out of war, economic crisis or bitter partisan division.
FDR faced the Great Depression. Harry Truman, his successor, was tasked with guiding the country out of the ravages of World War II, having taken the momentous decision to drop the atomic bomb.
Lyndon Baines Johnson may be the last commander-in-chief to have faced an electorate as shaken as today’s, stepping up after the assassination of John F Kennedy.
Barack Obama took office as the world economy plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Biden faces multiple crises; a downturn worse than that which led to the 2008 recession, a pandemic that has claimed 400,000 American lives and is still out of control, and a country so divided that two-thirds of Republican voters believe he won the White House through electoral fraud.
At 78, Biden might have chosen retirement over a crisis presidency, despite his life-long ambition for the highest office.
Having run for president twice before, he deferred to Hillary Clinton in 2016 as he mourned the death of his elder son, Beau.
‘‘He didn’t need to run for president,’’ said Evan Osnos, his biographer.
But Biden came to view the Trump administration with increasing alarm, as ‘‘a kind of emergency of democracy’’.
On Tuesday night Biden led the country’s first ever national memorial for Americans lost to the pandemic, acknowledging a tragedy that President Trump had appeared to view as an irritating spoiler of his chances of re-election.
Yet following a divisive and disruptive Trump presidency requires more than a change of tone.
Biden’s first day on the job featured a bold series of executive orders turning a page on the Trump era, to be followed by a 10-day blitz of legislative proposals.
That agenda sets him up for an immediate clash with Congress, where Republican co-operation will still be required to overcome the filibuster, despite the Democrats’ slim majority.
The unrelenting partisan rancour of today’s politics may simply be more than any one man can overcome, but a refusal to weaponise America’s divides is the only possible start.