Biden’s politics out of sync with times
Joe Biden may have been the right answer to the tumult in the country at the end of Donald Trump’s first term. His climate-change legislation is a substantial, enduring achievement. It will place the country on a new glide path on the environment, making a difference in the fight to save the Earth.
But that — and his rise in job approval to 44%, up from 38% last month, according to Gallup — should not obscure the larger historical truth: Despite his early September remarks about political extremism, Biden is out of sync with the times and, unlike his two predecessors, he hasn’t defined, transformed or even altered the political and cultural character of the country.
Unless Trump is imprisoned or branded a two-time loser — and even if he is; neither is out of the question — people on the right for decades will call themselves the new Donald Trump, or the freshly minted Donald Trump, or Trump on steroids, in the same way hockey’s Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid were called the next Wayne Gretzky. Former Gov. Paul LePage of Maine says he was Donald Trump before Donald Trump. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is running for reelection as the next Donald Trump.
No one is running this fall as the next Joe Biden, even though there are moments — on abortion, for example — when the president isn’t governing as the old Joe Biden. It once was a compliment to say that someone was one of a kind. Biden is the last of a kind. He’s living an old definition of politics rather than giving a new definition to politics.
To be sure, redefining politics is a difficult act to pull off. Abraham Lincoln did it, and so did Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. For all their gifts, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson didn’t. Jimmy Carter certainly didn’t. Nor did either George Bush. Barack Obama almost did — simply getting elected was an historic achievement, and passing Obamacare was a substantial change — but the Obama style has faded even though the Kennedy and Reagan styles haven’t.
The old dog in the White House has been trying to learn new tricks since he became vice president. He deserves plaudits for trying, and there is no disgrace in being lumped in history as a salve to a nation’s wounds. Now that the passions of the time have dissipated, the country may never stop appreciating Gerald Ford.
The old definition of politics is a century and a half old: the art of the possible. The actual quote, borrowed by scores of politicians — when civil politics rather than civil war seemed possible — goes this way: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” It’s from Otto von Bismarck. He became chancellor of Germany when Ulysses S. Grant was president. He has been out of office for 132 years.
Biden’s conception of politics is clearly the art of “the attainable — the art of the next best.” That’s why he trimmed the left’s college-loan proposal and why he was willing to accept a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin and permit concessions for the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats swallowed a bite rather than the whole, but did so reluctantly. None of the Republicans even nibbled.
But here’s the point: The Bismarck remark was the leitmotif of politics from the age of the steamboat through the age of the space shuttle. Now it’s the age of the Artemis moon mission. Unless the Democrats — or the rump of Republicans now dismissed as RINOs — present a new rubric, the enduring leitmotif could be a variation of “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The old dog in the White House has been trying to learn new tricks since he became vice president. He deserves plaudits for trying, and there is no disgrace in being lumped in history as a salve to a nation’s wounds. Now that the passions of the time have dissipated, the country may never stop appreciating Gerald Ford.
As Obama’s understudy, Biden learned that many Republicans weren’t interested in compromise, a far cry from the Senate he knew well even at the end of his tenure in 2009. Some Republican senators today don’t believe he is a legitimate president, or at least they say so publicly. In the Trump years, they were not nearly as interested in protecting the legislative branch against encroachment from the executive branch as they are today. Even in the Richard Nixon years, some Republicans were troubled by the encroachments of the 37th president, which took the form of budget impoundments.
Biden’s coming of age was in the 1972 election, remembered nationwide as a Republican landslide — Nixon swept 49 states. In Delaware, that election is remembered for the triumph of the New Castle County councilman Joe Biden over two-term incumbent GOP Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, despite Nixon carrying the state with 59.6% of the vote. (The conventional definition of a landslide is 60%.)
Nixon’s 1972 triumph skews the political profile of the country, but even so, exit polls from that election provide perspective on how Biden views the world. In the campaign in which he began his 36 years in the Senate — longer than life expectancy in Colonial America — women voted for the Republican presidential candidate by a 61-37 margin. In 2020, women voted for the Democratic candidate by a 57-42 margin.
But most relevant this summer is how those with college degrees voted. Americans with university diplomas voted Republican by a 52-35 margin in 1972. They voted Democratic by a 56-42 margin in Biden’s 2020 election. Lest you think that 1972 was an aberration, college graduates sided with Republicans in every election since then but one (2008, a virtual tie) … until Trump (“I love the poorly educated”) ran in 2016.
In the years when Republicans won the college vote, they wouldn’t have howled against college-loan assistance. The original GI Bill, which sent 8 million veterans to college, was drafted by Harry W. Colmery, former national commander of the American Legion and former Republican national chairman.
In 1790, at the same point in George Washington’s presidency as where Biden is now, John Adams said of the first president, “His person, countenance, character, and actions are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people.” Even discounting the impact of the first president, no one today would say Biden is the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people. Like many presidents before him, he is a bridge figure. But a bridge to where?