I am pretty sure that from very soon after President Biden was inaugurated, I wrote and/or said that he had one essential mission, one which he was uniquely situated to do. To bring to bear his basic decency and his long experience with so many different types of people and groups in our society, and to bring people back to an American center. Not a set of policy compromises, or an unattainable moderate politics. Just to get to people who had become disillusioned about whether national generosity and decency and education matter, who were doubting the American exceptionalism that makes a country work with tremendous diversity of origins and religions and views about the role of government. To show all those people that they could talk to him and he could listen to them, and that they could talk and listen to each other.
I argued that he should do this not for policy goals, though that might be nice. But to detox the political rhetoric and to enlarge somewhat a political ”center” where people remain divided ideologically but recognize each other as committed Americans who win and lose elections and policy decisions.
We needed President Biden to travel the country in this way from day one in office, because no one else was or has been able to do it. To find partners in communities where most people did not vote for him. Not people who think he and his party are evil threats to their way of life, or who believe that nonwhite immigrants are the paradigm of every threat imaginable to life and prosperity. I mean the people who leaned away from him and the Democrats recently, or who have always been more conservative but still wanted to believe in most of their fellow citizens and a community among the different.
I don’t know how much President Biden could have succeeded. It wouldn’t have yielded him any short-term political benefit. It might well have given us a different Republican president in 2025, one without the hateful and brutal rhetoric and intentions – a President Haley or Rubio.
Yet how could President Biden have thought that this was such a distant second to his policy goals or his use of his initial legislative majorities?. How could he have thought that he was the last candidate standing, in the 2020 primaries and the general election, for any reason other than his unique persona and this mission? He certainly wasn’t nominated or elected because of his total record or his unique policy menu in 2020. He was elected to be not-Trump not in policy terms but civic terms.
Why didn’t he do it? Oh, why?
Maybe he wasn’t physically up to it. Maybe he thought that just being not-Trump, not dominating everything in the media, would leave room for other kinds of air to come in on its own. Maybe he believed what Democrats always believe and is never true in the short-term, that policy achievements even on a massive scale would change people’s feelings.
I don’t know and I don’t especially care. I suppose the signs were even in his inaugural address, where he just asserted the decency of Americans, labeled a fringe and called them a small fringe, and left it at that. He should have instead announced a plan to put himself personally on the line to make his American vision real and visible and palpable.
So this is why I will feel that President Biden has some historic fail on his record, a fail that matters.
I say this with extra regret because I do think that Joe Biden is also the most menschy president of my lifetime. I expect that less and less of presidents, and also need that less and less. I have for a while made myself stop falling in love with presidents. I think there’s a minimum threshold of decency we need in a president, it doesn’t have to be the kind we would want in a friend, and the extra can be traded for effectiveness in other areas. I don’t equate personal goodness with political virtue. But in my lifetime (I was born during the Johnson administration), I don’t think there is anyone who has held the office who was a better human being than Joe Biden has been overall through his time in public life. Obviously there are some terrible blots on this, particularly Anita Hill. Yet to use a cliché, his love not just for America but for Americans are powerful. If you want to get a glimpse into how Joe Biden the man has never waned, take a listen to him on Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief.
I am not one who puts the uniting above the policies, which have direct effects on wellbeing and life. (There was an essay by Michael Walzer in early 2017 that I think articulated the proper relationship between those two things just right.) I just think there was so much more President Biden could have done early in his term especially, to reconstruct some “center” even within the policy horizon he set for himself. He didn’t, and here we are.
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