The new Biden is focused, resolved and transformed
For the life of me, I can’t find Joe Biden. Should we send a search party?
Sure, I see the photographs and video footage of him. I tuned in a little more than a week ago when he made that first big prime-time television address. I caught his interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos.
I know there’s a man with Biden’s name in the White House, taking meetings, reading briefing papers and most definitely signing legislation. That $1.9 trillion behemoth was epochal. He has a sense of urgency and big ambitions.
But he doesn’t resemble the Biden I observed during his 4 1/2-decade political career until mid2019, when a markedly muted version stepped out to campaign for the presidency. This Biden lacks the old Biden’s goofy exuberance, cartoonish loquaciousness and all-around indiscipline. This new Biden lacks the old Biden’s inimitable Biden-ness.
It’s a curious thing, and I’m not saying it’s a bad one. It’s arguably the reason he got to the Resolute desk after two botched tries. It’s why there’s now talk of his presidency as transformational.
But it will be transformational to the extent that it’s unlike any presidency anyone would have predicted for Biden. It’ll be transformational to the degree that he approaches it in an un-Biden-like fashion — with his head down, his comments proscribed and his focus precise.
That’s how he beat a crowded field of contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, a steadydoes-it victory made possible by a caliber of patience and kind of calm that had never been his trademarks.
That’s how he vanquished Donald Trump — by not babbling too much, not taking the bait, tamping down his ego and making his quest about what Americans needed, not about what an amazing president he would be.
No culture wars for America’s 46th president: Those are distractions that give oxygen to a gasping Republican Party. He’s coming to your rescue.
He’s sending you money. Emphasis on “your” and “you.” The dirtiest word in his revised vocabulary is the first-person singular.
This new, Biden is an exorcism of Trump. This no-drama Biden is an echo of Barack Obama, whose lessons, good and bad, he has learned. In the process he has accomplished one of the most striking personality transplants I’ve seen in American politics.
Many officials in the Obama administration came to believe, in retrospect, that the enormous 2009 stimulus was in fact too modest and that its mechanism for delivering relief to Americans in need was neither obvious enough to its recipients nor adequately touted. With the American Rescue Plan and his state-hopping celebration of it, Biden has addressed that concern.
Some in the Obama administration felt they squandered too much time seeking Republican support for Obamacare when it was never destined to come. Biden enacted the American Rescue Plan without a single Republican vote.
That arithmetic doesn’t fit the way Biden described himself across the decades or even how he talked during much of his campaign. But Republican obstructionism, a fraught passage in American history, and the prevailing passions of today’s Democrats have collaborated in a metamorphosis that defies the usual arc of a life.
So much for the Biden whose musings helped tank his first two presidential campaigns, who preempted Obama’s changed position on marriage equality, who used a curse word to crow that Obamacare was a big (bleeping) deal. Abracadabra: He made himself vanish.
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