THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY BLOG

Too Many Forks in the Road

The Biden presidency’s fundamental dilemma. 

 

“When You Come to a Fork in the Road Take It”- Yogi Berra

Every president faces numerous leadership and governing dilemmas. At their core, many of them spring from the differences between a president’s political circumstances and their presidential style and ambitions. This core dilemma is particularly acute for newly certified president-elect Joe Biden.

No modern president obtains that office by accident. They do so by forging a successful plan to navigate the political campaign currents in which they must swim. They must also successfully present themselves as having the requisite ambitions, style, and skills to successfully make progress on what they said they want to accomplish.

In this core respect, the Biden presidency begins with a unique set of personal and political circumstances. He beat an incumbent president who had many accomplishments to his credit—no small accomplishment. He did so, however, with literally a stay-at-home campaign strategy. Whether that sprang from concerns about the personal risks of campaigning during a Covid pandemic, political strategy, or both is somewhat immaterial to its consequences. During the campaign, Biden's personal and political exposure was very limited and highly managed with the result that the ordinary give and take that helps to define a campaign simply didn’t take place.

As a result, Mr. Biden will start his presidency with the fewest specifically stated policy aims and the vaguest presidential ambitions seen in many years. The day after the election Mr. Biden said: “The presidency itself is not a partisan institution. It’s the one office in this nation that represents everyone, and it demands a duty of care for all Americans. That is precisely what I will do.”

The New York Times noted, “This is a soothing bit of uplift” but continued  with the unresolved question: “But in a nation so starkly polarized, what does it even mean?" What those phrases mean and how he tries to accomplish them will be the lynchpin of a Biden presidency and its success.

Biden’s campaign left an unprecedented presidential expectation vacuum. Obviously, the country’s profound political polarization was not resolved by Biden’s election. It was exacerbated. Yet, paradoxically, these features provide Mr. Biden with political running room, but only he has the inclination and the skills to make use of it.  

Biden has spent a political lifetime as a team player and institutionalist—on the New Castle County Council from 1970-'72, as U.S. Senator from 1973 to 2009, and then as Vice-President during the two terms of the Obama Administration. Now, for the first time in his life, he is truly in charge and has the opportunity, given the circumstances of his election, to be truly his own man and define his own unique presidency. 

No modern president expends the enormous amount of effort necessary to gain that office without a firm belief in the sagacity of his own political and policy views be they left, right, or center. And Biden is no exception. However, his political views have been marinated in Democratic Party politics and narratives that have moved substantially leftward. As a result, he now finds himself in the difficult position of governing a country in which almost half of its voters disagree, often strongly, with his party’s political and policy narratives that have been deeply formative influences of his political life and career.  

The country clearly needs to take steps toward a political reconciliation among its deeply polarized factions. Yet to accomplish this, Mr. Biden will have to find a way to overcome or finesse those in his party who would like to see his presidency consolidate a much more progressive foundation. The Times opines that Mr. Biden’s “persistent challenge will be to deal with all parties respectfully, bringing people into the conversation and making them feel heard.” In reality, however, he will have to find a real way to honestly include the views of those who voted against him and his party up and down the ballot. More moderate opponents of Mr. Biden’s, and there are many among Trump supporters did not feel comfortable with his fight-club presidency. They will not, however, be satisfied with pro forma recitations of their views devoid of real policy or political steps in their direction. 

Mr. Biden's final fork in the road, the one that underlies all of his presidency’s risks and opportunities, is therefore his capacity to find ways to transcend his own firmly established identity as a career Democrat. This country has endured a rolling, fractious accumulating crisis of leadership legitimacy and policy effectiveness stretching back decades. That has been accompanied by various cosmetic narrative policy changes attempting to square the liberal-conservative circle. What is needed now are true efforts at political and policy reconciliation, not more rhetorical ones.

Becoming America’s modern-day Cincinnatus is almost an impossible task for presidents shaped by the hard developmental crucible of their own long-nurtured ambitions. Whether Mr. Biden has the political courage or capacity to step outside of his developmental political history and put real political reconciliation before more strategic symbolic politics meant to gain more power for “our side” while appearing not to, is the major presidential leadership question that he and the country faces.

Biden's first statement on being chosen by the presidency’s  electors, a scathing attack on Trump and by association his followers, in the very same remarks in which he called on the county, “To Unite. To Heal,” was not reassuring in this regard.