Biden’s election will end national nightmare 2.0
Joe Biden’s election will end national nightmare 2.0, the nation’s second domestic debacle in two generations. Hell, Thomas Hobbes supposedly said, is truth seen too late, and in 2020, the nation, having seen it in the nick of time, will select for the Oval Office someone who, having served 36 years 16 blocks to the east, knows this: A complex nation cannot be governed well without the lubricating conciliations of a healthy legislative life.
Biden won the Democrats’ nomination by soundly defeating rivals who favored — or, pandering, said they favored — a number of niche fixations (e.g., abolishing ICE, defunding police). He clinched his nomination earlier and easier than did the winners in the Democrats’ most recent intensely contested nomination competitions (Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in 2008; Clinton against Bernie Sanders in 2016).
Biden does not endorse Medicare-for-all: He understands, as some competitors for the nomination amazingly did not, that for several decades organized labor’s most important agenda has been negotiating employer-provided health care as untaxed compensation. Similarly, Biden does not oppose fracking, which provides many of the more than 300,000 Pennsylvania jobs supported by the oil and gas industry, and many others in Ohio and elsewhere. He understands, as some progressives seem not to, that presidential elections are won not by pleasing the most intense faction but by assembling a temperate coalition.
Biden has not endorsed packing the Supreme Court: When President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after carrying 46 of 48 states in 1936, tried that maneuver, the blowback in the 1938 congressional elections erased his liberal legislating majority in Congress, and coalitions of conservative (mostly Southern) Democrats and Republicans prevailed until President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 landslide produced a liberal congressional majority — briefly.
Biden came to the Senate eight years later, in the aftermath. In 1965 and 1966, Democrats wielding lopsided congressional majorities (295 to 140 in the House, 68 to 32 in the Senate) had lunged beyond majority public opinion. Voters’ retribution included Republican victories in five of the next six presidential elections. Also, Biden was vice president in 2010 when the electorate, after just two years of unified government under Democrats, ended it.
One of Biden’s closest confidants, who has an agreeable preference for anonymity, says that Biden was initially ambivalent about seeking the 2020 nomination but “Charlottesville put him over the edge.” The confidant refers to the violence provoked by the August 2017 anti-Semitic demonstrators, and to President Trump’s assessment that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
The confidant calls Biden “a relief pitcher — he’s warming up in the bullpen right now,” preparing an administration with “a broad array of people.” The confidant recommends taking seriously Biden’s campaign’s slogan “Building Back Better.” The “Back” acknowledges the national desire for reassurance “that the world as they know it is recoverable.”
Many of Trump’s current campaign ads portray a dark, fraying America. They evoke the “hellhole” America that he described in 2015 that presaged his inaugural address reference to “American carnage.” Biden’s optimistic ads suggest that although it not now is, it soon could again be, “morning in America.”
Trump apologists say that before covid-19, all was well. “All” means only economic metrics: An American is supposedly homo economicus, interested only in consumption, to the exclusion of civic culture. And never mind a pre-pandemic $1 trillion deficit — at full employment.
Such apologists insist that Democratic administrations jeopardize prosperity. So, these apologists are not merely projecting their one-dimensional selves onto their more well-rounded compatriots, they are ignoring 120 years of inconvenient data (as noted by Jeff Sommer in the New York Times): “Since 1900 the stock market has fared far better under Democratic presidents, with a 6.7 percent annualized return for the Dow Jones industrial average compared with just 3.5 percent under Republicans.”
Richard M. Nixon’s “imperial presidency” included Ruritanian White House uniforms, which did not survive nationwide snickering. Ford’s presidential modesty produced reports of something that was remarkable only because it was remarked upon: At breakfast, Ford popped his own English muffins into the presidential toaster. Forty-six years later, an exhausted nation is again eager for manifestations of presidential normality.
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