JOE BIDEN’S GREATEST ASSET? TIMING.
If Joe Biden should win the election in November, he’ll be only the second president in American history to finally make it to the White House on his third attempt (after Ronald Reagan). Not only that, he’d do it 32 years after his first try in 1988, an extraordinarily long stretch of presidential ambition.
No one who has watched Biden over the years thinks his success this year is because he has become more skilled or charismatic than he was in 1988 or 2008, when his first two runs were so weak and flamed out so quickly. Indeed, through 2019 it looked like his third campaign would turn out just as poorly, as he ran a lethargic campaign that seemed to generate little interest.
The fact that he’s now about to be nominated to lead the Democratic Party at long last, and that polls show him ahead of President Donald Trump by around 8 or 9 points on average, both prove something that we often don’t pay enough attention to: the importance of timing.
All of us are attracted to stories with compelling characters, and that’s how we think about politics. While impersonal forces and unforeseeable events make a great deal of difference, at the center of it all lie individual people bending history to their will, people we think have the strengths and weaknesses that determine the outcome of events. But Biden is the best demonstration you could imagine that timing is everything.
I’ll admit that for most of the primary campaign, I dismissed Biden’s chances because I focused too much on him and not enough on the forces that might lift him up. His previous runs had been so bad that it seemed impossible for him to defeat a large field of talented candidates.
But the nightmare of the Trump presidency changed everything for Democratic voters. They didn’t want the most charismatic person, or the one offering the most comprehensive program for change, or the one who embodied their party’s future. They wanted the candidate who would be least offensive to other voters — in other words, an older white man with plenty of experience and a reputation as a moderate.
It looks like those voters made the right judgment. When the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis hit, the case for someone with Biden’s profile — experienced, calm, reassuring — became even stronger.
When we look back on previous successful presidential campaigns, we see a similar situation: In case after case, the eventual winner was not necessarily the person who was the biggest talent (though sometimes that was true as well); instead, they were the person who was right for the moment.
Just look at the current president. At first everyone considered him a joke. But in 2016, a loudmouth bigot was exactly what Republican primary voters were ready for. Eight years of a Black president, a steady diet of race-baiting from conservative media, and the widespread feeling that Republican leaders were feckless and weak created the opening for Trump to barge through.
Other presidents may not have needed quite that spectacular confluence of circumstances, but they all had good timing.
Over the course of the Democratic convention, we’ll hear a lot of rhetoric meant to convince us that Biden is a unique individual, possessed of experience and skills and empathy and vision no living American could match. It won’t be quite false, but it will certainly be puffed up, gilded, even exaggerated.
The truth, however, is that Biden looks like the right candidate right now, even if he wasn’t before and wouldn’t be again. But that has usually been enough.