Understanding Biden

Credit Joe Biden with self-awareness. He is the person he describes himself to be. He is, above all, a survivor. And that pretty much explains how we got to where we are right now.

The key trait that has animated Biden’s long career is a keen desire and an ability to remain in office. He has consistently adjusted his positions to wherever the power center was in the Democratic Party, even to the extent of changing his position on abortion. He has wanted to be President probably for his entire life, but certainly as an active pol for about four or five decades.

So we shouldn’t have been surprised when Biden decided to seek a second term. (I was disappointed, but not surprised.) Because Biden’s whole world is all about the next election, he was more or less incapable of doing what he should have done in his first (and what should have been and now likely will be his only) term.

Had Biden understood where he was in American history and what the country needed from him over the last four years he would have acted very differently. What the country needed was the “transitional” leader he once promised to be. It needed the grandfather he is. We needed Ike, but we got FDR-lite.

Biden’s task was to heal the open wounds left by the most awful human being ever to occupy the White House. He won because enough independents and anti-Trump Republicans joined Democrats to oust Trump. He did not have a mandate to pursue far left policies. People voted against Trump, but not so much for Biden.

Outside of a relative handful of activists in the Democratic coalition, the country was not looking for an activist government. It was looking for stability, decency, normalcy, maybe some incremental improvements here and there. To the extent people wanted the government to do anything, the bipartisan infrastructure bill was pretty much it. And, in fact, that is probably Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment, and no mean feat given that that much needed program had been stalled in Congress for a very long time.

He should have stopped there. But he couldn’t because he never understood what his role was. Wired to just keep running — to keep surviving as an elected official — he believed he needed to keep the elite activist wing of his party in his corner. So he pursued student loan forgiveness, a host of policies to favor Blacks, Hispanics and women over others, and most damaging of all, a COVID relief bill that was way more than needed and contributed to the inflation that, until his recent mental lapses, might have been the main thing that brings him down.

Biden didn’t stay in the middle because he believed he couldn’t afford to alienate the party’s activists and win a second term. I don’t believe he ever so much as entertained the notion of not running again. Staying in office is just too ingrained in his DNA. And so he never saw himself as having the freedom to pursue the policies — or non-policies — that most of the public wanted.

In most cases grit should be admired. There’s a lot to be said for what my mother used to call “stick-to-it-tiveness.” (“Determination” means the same thing and is an actual word, but I liked my mom’s phrase better.)

But there’s also a lot to be said for understanding your role vis a vis the broader community. In baseball even great hitters have to understand when they’re pulled for a pinch hitter in a given situation. They understand that it’s not about them; it’s about giving their team the best chance to win. It’s about playing the percentages.

And that’s what Biden doesn’t get. This is not about him. This is not about his own self-image of being a survivor. He may be satisfied if he loses but he gave his all, but that still leaves the rest of us stuck with Donald Trump. Because he thinks like a politician, and not like a leader, he just can’t see the damage he’s doing to his party and, ultimately, to his country.

Biden could have been a great President by recognizing where he was in history, by correctly evaluating what the country needed, providing it and then graciously stepping aside. But it turns out that Biden was never that man. He is, in fact as he sees himself, a survivor. Just another politician looking to stay in office — and at all costs.