In Biden, U.S. seeks a Lincoln

There are many dangers ahead for that great survivor of American politics, Joe Biden. There is a deadly virus that is rampaging across the land even as it is mutating, economic challenges, a wealth and privilege gap that is widening, potential troubles with Iran, allies wary of America’s commitments and direction, and citizens at home and abroad worried about the endurance of democratic institutions in what remains the globe’s most powerful economic and military power.

That list exemplifies what your sixth-grade teacher would call a run-on sentence. That is because the problems run on and on. And that is before we mention the fundamental crisis:

There are great divisions in a country that has not experienced such social and political chasms in 160 years.

Now -- if you have the stomach for it -- let us add one other threat:

The danger that Biden, who became a senator exactly 10 months before Richard Nixon embarked on his Saturday Night Massacre that catapulted the Watergate scandal from a twobit burglary into a full-blown constitutional crisis, will take the comfortable route of being the Jerry Ford of his time.

Ford, who ascended to the presidency in the wake of the last great challenge to the Constitution, was a good man who served up comfort food to a troubled nation. He toasted his own English muffins. He held hands with his wife. Even his pardon of Nixon -- reviled at the time, celebrated today -- was meant to heal the country. He was, as he liked to say, a Ford and not a Lincoln.

But the country today needs a Lincoln and not a Ford.

The Baileys-IrishCream smoothness of Biden is a marked contrast with Donald J. Trump, who in many aspects reflects the characteristics of Don Calogero Sedara in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 masterpiece novel “The Leopard”: “Free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other names by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.”

And yet the disparity between the two men will get Biden only so far. It will give him a little room to maneuver, certainly. It will win plaudits from the mainstream networks and newspapers, and maybe a grudging reprieve from other precincts of the press.

But the room that all this provides is a birthright, deriving from Trump, not a new burst of energy, purpose and direction coming from Biden.

He must deal with a fractured party, and he must recognize that the sense of outrage and dispossession that fueled the Trump ascendancy once belonged to those who are his putative allies today.

Biden for the past several weeks has been like a ship captain scanning perilous weather forecasts even as he was recruiting a crew for his passage into dangerous waters. For the ship of state, as for those commanding seafaring vessels, the nautical website CrewSeekers International offers important counsel: “If a ship does not have enough ‘leeway’ it is in danger of being driven onto the shore.” Biden will need some leeway from the public, too.

To this challenge, Biden brings important gifts. In his essay “Greatness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Lincoln that he was a “man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commended the admiration of the wisest,” adding, “His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.”

That is a passage Biden’s aides should put before him this month. They might also provide him with a copy of David S. Reynolds’ “Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times,” published in September. Urge him to exercise caution in picking it up -- its 1,088 pages weigh 3.1 pounds, a heavy lift -- but make sure he reads the opening of Chapter 13:

There are clear takeaways from America’s greatest president. To be an effective leader in a deeply divided time, keep to the center while clinging to the nation’s core principle of human equality. Make the center lively -- even, at times, shocking. And don’t forget young voters.

Be a Lincoln, not a Ford.