Politics Today: Everyman Joe Biden meets the moment
WASHINGTON — The silence that suddenly has descended on the political scene with Donald Trump in self-imposed hiding is a blessing to Presidentelect Joe Biden, who is often derided as not knowing when to stop talking.
Trump’s sulking and slinking off is precisely what Biden needs as he undertakes the serious task of organizing the next administration, with a roster of no-nonsense experts in governance and public policy not seen over the last four years of the Trump administration.
Biden is reintroducing himself at home and abroad after nearly half a century of public service as a familiar veteran of the Washington
scene and foreign policy at the highest levels. As a longtime globetrotter on a first-name basis with other world leaders, he will hit the ground running, to restore America’s reputation as a trustworthy custodian of collective security across the landscape.
Biden’s election has come at a time the world at large looks to the United States for the stability and leadership that marked our foreign policy ever since the Second World War.
In the current hiatus before the Biden inauguration on January 20, Americans will have the opportunity to re-evaluate the man Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” in light of the tremendous responsibilities soon to fall to him. He has already made a serious start in enlisting proven doers to assist him, mostly lacking in celebrity but well respected in their fields of expertise.
The only household name in the first bunch of hires, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, will not be a cabinet member but will hold one of several National Security Council seats, focused on the issue of climate change.
Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is little known outside the foreign-policy community but has been the president-elect’s longtime right-hand man in the field, beginning at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Biden and rising to assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama. His appointment bodes well for a Western alliance needing reassurance after Trump’s policy travesty.
In a striking way, laid-back Joe Biden begins to emerge as another underestimated foot solider in the manner of another former senator and vice president, Harry Truman of Missouri, who surprised his countrymen and allies abroad as a take-charge presidential accident.
Truman came to the Oval Office upon
FDR’s death unaware of the development of the atomic bomb, the use of which at his order decisively ended World War II. He went on to be revered as a steady hand on the tiller who startled most observers by winning an election in his own right in 1948 over New York’s officious Thomas E. Dewey.
Biden has been taken for granted in some quarters as a windbag.
But in his familiarity with the ways of official Washington, and with an equally recognized empathy for the country’s working stiffs so conspicuously absent in the departing president, Biden is well prepared to assume the task of restoring credibility to the presidency after the four years of mayhem now drawing to a close.
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