Needed a Lincoln, Not a Ford

And certainly not an Edsel. 

 

A recent Washington Post article on President Biden’s “...‘easy choice' to go it alone with Democrats on coronavirus relief” prominently featured a picture of the president speaking with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln behind him. It was not the first time that Lincoln’s name or image has been invoked in connection with the Biden Presidency and doubtless, it will not be the last.

President Mr. Biden himself has invoked Lincoln several times. In his Inaugural Address, President  Biden identified with Lincoln, saying (emphasis added): 

“And another January on New Year’s Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, and I quote, “If my name ever goes down into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” My whole soul was in it today on this January day, my whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation, and I ask every American to join me in this cause.”

As is the case with presidents, few have been shy about offering this president their advice even if not asked. Among their suggestions were the need for a war on white supremacy, curbing the excesses of the left, and not being hypermasculine and toxic.

Perhaps the most startling and dramatic piece of advice from others, including former FBI Director, James Comey, was the suggestion that President Biden pardon Mr. Trump from further criminal charges that Democrats are filing.

The advantages and liabilities of such a decision are clear. President Biden’s progressive allies would be furious. On the other hand, it would be a dramatic statement and action that “…would also allow Biden to declare that he is following through on his pledge to unite America.” 

One immediately thinks here of Gerald Ford and his comforting but short 895-day presidency. After succeeding Richard Nixon, Ford pardoned him. That act of public reconciliation came at great political and personal cost. Though it was “reviled at the time, [it is] celebrated today—was meant to heal the country.” It was a courageous act of personal decency and political healing and very Lincolnesque. It is worth asking how.

One commentator has suggested that President Biden needs to be more than a not-Trump president “with a comforting uncle profile.” In commenting on his own political speaking abilities, Ford liked to say that “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln,” and he promised to emulate Lincoln’s “plain [presumably honest] speaking.” Without mentioning the obvious paradox of Ford’s Lincoln-like treatment of Mr. Nixon, that commentator suggests “the country today needs a Lincoln and not a Ford.” The question is: Exactly what does that mean?.

The Union was saved from dismemberment by a brutal Civil War. Lincoln’s brief Second Inaugural Address contained these stirring words of healing and reconciliation:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Lincoln did not, as Biden did, call for “unity,” but for healing and reconciliation. Yet, he did more than reach for and find almost the perfect tone of a rhetorical premise to frame the clearly difficult process of national emotional reconstruction that lay before the country. 

David Reynold’s well researched political biography of Lincoln notes the following [p. 458, emphasis added] :

“Lincoln balanced himself between extremes: between popular sovereignty and the demand of immediate abolition, between Southern and Northern views, between ungoverned higher laws and what he and other Republicans saw as the anti-slavery higher law within the Constitution. He thought that if he leaned too far in any direction the nation could fall into anarchy or despotism. With the political and cultural forces around him spinning towards centrifugal, he provided a solid centripetal counterweight.”

Lincoln applied his “solid centripetal counterweight” consistently in both rhetoric and actions. He literally paid with his life for his political courage. The September 22, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation and December 8, 1863, Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction to integrate successionist states back into the Union represent two of Lincoln’s strong efforts at moderation and balance within the context of an actual, and not metaphorical, Civil War.   

President Biden is in no such danger. American politics has crossed the Rubicon. However, this war is being fought for cultural and political supremacy on the battlefields of the country’s civic and cultural institutions nationwide. To date, there have been no military battles, invasions, and occupations. In that sense, President Biden’s path to creating a real “solid centripetal counterweight” to the forces pushing the country apart is easier. All he needs to do is combine the right words with forceful moderation in his actual policies.

 

He has not yet forcefully done so. As a result, the question seems not whether President Biden will become a Lincoln or even a Ford, but tragically, given what our country needs, an Edsel.

 

 

 A President in Search of Greatness

President Biden would like to channel FDR. 

 

President Biden’s down-home, “average Joe” political personality certainly seemed to preclude a presidency in search of greatness. Unlike President Obama, Biden had never publicly voiced the aspiration to be a great president.

Moreover, Biden himself, during his long and traditional Senate political career, had always found a comfortable political home squarely within whatever the mainstream of the Democratic Party was at the time. A review of his Senate record concluded: “Many of Biden’s positions were well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party at the time he took them.” He was not a policy innovator, and most certainly was not a policy disrupter. 

Given his age and the mainstream nature of his long institutional experience, some expected Mr. Biden to preside over a “caretaker presidency.” Indeed, during the campaign, Biden called himself “a transitional candidate whose job it is to bring the Mayor Petes of the world into his administration.” There had even been talk that Mr. Biden had in mind a one-term presidency.

Yet, according to another view, while campaigning from his Delaware basement, Biden “underwent a metamorphosis. He entered it a cautious pragmatist, yearning for a reversion to the time before Donald Trump; he left convinced of his chance to become a latter-day Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

Perhaps. His first actions as president have been consistent with that possibility. The New York Times informs us that President Biden wanted to model the first days of his presidency on FDR’s first one hundred. 

More specifically,

“In the weeks before taking office, President Biden and his aides spent time digging into books about Franklin D. Roosevelt… exploring his iconic first 100 days, on the theory that no president since then has taken office with the country in a crisis quite so grave.”

So, 

“They devised their own opening-days blitz by essentially compressing 100 days into 10. Mr. Biden has now signed about 45 executive orders… initiating major policy shifts on a wide array of issues, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice, immigration, climate change and transgender rights.”

While seemingly diverse, all these initiatives are united by their intent to reverse many previous administration policies, as expected. They are also united by all being “of concern to different liberal interest groups that are part of his coalition.” Both of these purposes are squarely within the legitimate purview of a new, or really any, presidential administration. Their core problem, however, is that they are all geared to President Biden’s progressive base. As a result, they are not really responsive and are likely to be antithetical to the country’s real, most basic problem—our deep cultural and political divisions.

The president and administration have said “unity” was their most important presidential purpose. However, they have also claimed that the country faces four other major crises: the COVID pandemic, rebuilding the economy, a worldwide climate crisis, and a systemic national racism crisis.

If President Biden truly believes in the existential nature of these crises, they would provide a rationale for the unusual surge in his post-election ambition levels. It is possible that Mr. Biden’s Roosevelt-level ambitions were always there and were hiding in plain sight. Perhaps. Yet, if that were the case, they seem to have been extremely well hidden, even to Biden. There was little hint of this in his two previous presidential candidacies or his most recent one. 

Clinton advisor Rahm Emmanuel was famously quoted as suggesting it was never a good political idea to let a crisis go to waste, and “what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

President Biden, in his own stated view, now has four existential crises to address. That may be more than enough for him to begin thinking of himself in FDR terms. The president has substantial resources of support to address these issues, whether they truly are depression -level national or world catastrophes or not.

His presidency is now supported by a House Democratic majority, party power parity in the Senate, and the support of the Democratic Party's establishment and its allies across the country’s cultural, political, and civic institutions. It is also supported by portions of the Republican Party establishment and its traditional business allies. It has gained further support from Americans of all political views fatigued by the Trump presidency, its catastrophic leadership failure at the January 6 Washington March and thereafter as the riot took place, and its low marks for dealing with the COVID pandemic. In all these political circumstances, there are opportunities that allow President Biden not to let these crises, whatever their real levels, go to waste. 

The siren call of presidential greatness is mostly thought of as occurring before a candidate runs for that office. However, the Biden Presidency suggests that need not necessarily be the case. Circumstances and living in a residence where greatness stares down upon you from iconic paintings is enough to give any president ideas, big ideas.

The crucial element is whether they are the right big ideas. President Biden is clearly trying to channel FDR. However, it is more responsive to the country’s real crises to say that we need a Lincoln.

                      President Biden's Elusive Political Center:  Reconciling rhetoric and actions

As President Biden settles into his first days in office, the most pressing question for him and for the country is: how will he govern? In theory, he has many options given his political circumstances.  

He was elected with a solid vote of the Electoral College and with a substantial majority of American voters. Many of his supporters based their vote on the hope for a less contentious, combative presidency, which the low-key, Delaware-centric Biden campaign promised to deliver.

Aside from flashes of temper, Biden’s long-established political persona embedded in decades of institutional Senate experience seemed consistent with this hope.

Ironically, the Democratic Party’s success in achieving Senate parity with Republicans, after winning two seats in Georgia, exposed the Biden presidency to enormous and unexpected political pressure. This came primarily from within his own political party rather than the swing voters who had supported him. Many in his party wanted, and now expected, a presidency that reflected and acted on their core progressive beliefs. In their view, a divided distribution of partisan political power in Congress could no longer be used to explain or legitimize the need for policy moderation or a preferred premise of bipartisanship. 

Interestingly, the now unavailable "safe haven" of divided Senate/House political control opened up a further set of deeper questions about President Biden’s political persona. His persona was certainly more moderate than former President Trump’s. Yet President Obama had also combined a smooth, practiced, and subtle grasp of bipartisan rhetorical narratives with a clear and demonstrated commitment to progressive policies. 

His advisors, and Obama himself, tried to elude this fact with euphemisms. One advisor offered him as a “visionary minimalist,” while Obama preferred to call himself a “progressive pragmatist” (Davis 2009). The difficulty with these efforts was that Obama had clearly and publicly acknowledged his desire to be a great, transformative president. The transformative path he wanted to take the country down was clearly progressive.

Biden did not publicly express any personal or presidential “greatness” aspirations during the campaign or during his career for that matter. However, the "how he will govern" question is still the core question of his presidency. It has its roots in the presidential choices that Biden's political circumstances allow. Given that “unity” has been put forward as a major rationale and purpose of his presidency, Biden could choose to govern as a real moderate, attempting to bridge political divisions with policies and rhetoric that could begin to heal the deep wounds of the country’s increasingly partisan politics of the last five decades.

Calls to “eliminate the vitriol” and stop “the ad hominem attacks on one another,” along with calls for unity by the president, are welcomed. However, they are inadequate on two grounds. 

First, Mr. Biden has begun his presidency with a long list of executive actions that are decidedly progressive. They have not only revised a number of Trump initiatives. That was expected. They have also done so in a way that reframes the narrative foundation of a national set of basic policy domains and placed them squarely within progressive racial justice assumptions. When the president speaks of the need to “..battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country,” a premise shared by Biden’s Chief of Staff, he is building on the premise that “systemic racism” is the factual condition of the country. That is a debatable view not widely shared by many Americans.

Second, his many executive initiatives are taking place at a time when political revenge against almost anything or anyone connected with the Trump administration has metastasized across the country’s cultural and political spectrum. To note just one example among hundreds, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has declared that “the enemy is within the House of Representatives.”

Similar rhetorical excesses nationwide have, in a number of cases, been met with silence from the White House. It is an odd reticence given the president’s public commitment to unity. As Jonathan Turley, a very substantively moderate scholar, has noted: 

“It will not end unless Biden calls out people in his own party and demands a lowering of such rhetoric. His words [calling for unity] continue to be drowned out by the words of his own party’s leadership.” 

Many of President Biden’s initiatives in his first days in office clearly reflect the ardently held narrative assumptions of the party’s strong progressive wing. They are distinctive, but not wildly divergent from those of the comparatively somewhat more moderate views of the party’s center, which has moved decidedly left over the years. 

Mr. Biden’s multiple progressive executive initiatives have become so pronounced and obvious that even the New York Times has suggested, “Ease Up on the Executive Actions, Joe." Progressive pundits are enthusiastic that Mr. Biden has been “surprisingly progressive” and perhaps is a "liberal crusader." However, candidate Biden campaigned on a platform of reconciliation. 

Mr. Biden's initial flurry of major progressive initiatives seems likely to inflame rather than soothe. The country is still, therefore, left to reconcile the president’s rhetoric and actions. The question now is not so much where the country’s political center lies, but where is President Biden’s.

References

Teddy Davis, “Obama Dubs Himself a ‘Pragmatic Progressive,’” ABC News, January 8, 2009