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

 

Trump’s Personal Catastrophic Failure of Presidential Leadership: Why?

 

The Trump Presidency will end on January 20, 2021. However, it died, morally and politically, on January 5 as a result of a series of personal presidential leadership blunders of historic dimensions.

 

A riotous spasm of resentment took place in Washington on that date. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters had come to town primarily to protest what many felt was a stolen election. President Trump made a clearly equivocal address to the marchers in which he said both, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” and also “Make no mistake, this election stolen from you, from me and from the country.” 

 

Even as Trump was talking, a sizeable group had split off from the main marcher assembly and began their physical assault on the Capitol building. They overran an inexcusably light Capital Police Guard presence. They breached restraining barriers, entered the Senate and began a riot that temporarily shut down the official counting of electoral votes confirming Joe Biden as the next president.  

 

Senators were evacuated under armed guard. Senate offices and the Senate floor itself were occupied. Five people died, including one unarmed protester shot by a Capital policeman and a capital policeman who collapsed and later died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. It was a shocking crescendo to Trump’s determined two month effort to reverse an election result he couldn’t and didn’t accept by casting doubt on its legitimacy.

 

Trump’s political judgment and leadership skills failed him in the aftermath of his election loss to Joe Biden and culminated in two key events on January 6. In the first, Trump said that Vice-president Mike Pence had it within his power to deny Mr. Biden election certification, and urged him to do so. Had that happened, it would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives and led to a possible Trump victory. However, it would have thrown the country into a major constitutional and political crisis from which it would not have easily recovered.

 

The second major failure of Trump’s Judgment and leadership skills occurred in his address to the crowd of his supporters. Even as a riot was taking place in the Senate chambers and Trump was urging calm, he could not keep from raising again the same stolen election issues that had helped fuel, but were not the only cause, of the marcher’s resentment and anger in the first place. 

 

Trump has been impeached a second time in the House for incitement of insurrection in connection with that speech. Whether Trump’s equivocal message to the marchers qualified for this second impeachment will be debated. What is now clear in retrospect however, is that a number of those who came to Washington for the march had been planning on violence for some time. Trump’s talk had little to do with their rioting; they were already planning it before they arrived.    

 

However, Trump knew that a large number of courts had considered, some fairly fully, his and his supporters’ allegations of fraud. They had not found sufficient evidence to move forward. However, instead of moderating his talk to the marchers by just voicing a determination to see these issues legally through, he gave the impression that if only the crowd could, by marching towards Congress and letting their voices be heard, pressure Mr. Pence or Congress to do the “right thing”, he would win. In his own words: “All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

 

In so saying, Trump placed a mountain of his own hopes and those of his supporters, on a very thin reed with likely catastrophic constitutional and political consequences. In so doing, he also set up his supporters at the march and across the country, for a wholly expectable disappointment. Trump traduced their support in the service of his own inability to accept a loss he didn’t think possible or warranted and for which there could be no other explanation, in his mind, than fraud.

 

The question is why did Trump’s judgment and political skill collapse. 

 

Trump had managed to withstand withering 24/7 attacks and efforts at sabotaging his presidency from all quarters, inside and outside his administration and from almost every major American cultural and political institution, even before he entered office. Yet he still made substantial progress on the policies, agree with them or not, that animated his presidency. A number of Trump’s judgments made during his presidency were certainly questionable, but they were also frequently understandable and, unlike his post-election judgments, were not overtly and obviously catastrophically self-sabotaging. 

 

For Trump critics, the answer is clear. Trump is a narcissist, who only cares about himself and was willing to countenance untested and highly debatable constitutional means to stay in power. This all-purpose narcissistic narrative point for every Trump criticism fails to take into account any other evidence. For example, from early into and throughout his presidency, Trump wanted to do a good job for the country and be recognized for doing it if he were successful:

“I am awed by the job, as anybody would be, but I honestly, Tom [Friedman], I feel so comfortable and you know it would be, to me, a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two years and say — and have a lot of the folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ And I don’t mean just a conservative job, ’cause I’m not talking conservative. I mean just, we’ve done a good job.”

 

It doesn’t take into account his wanting to protect the country from China’s one-sided trade policies, getting Europeans to help pay from their own defense, trying to bring new accords to old conflicts in the Middle East, and a number of other Trump policy initiatives.

 

No, narcissism-- that all- purpose answer for Trump critics doesn’t work. What then does? One clue is found in Trump’s life-long experience of being told no--by his father on his move to Manhattan, by others when he wanted to develop Manhattan real-estate, when he lost and then regained a fortune, when he made a successful career out of branding and being a T.V celebrity, and finally politically, as president. Trump’s life-long-experience of always having overcome adversity through prodigious effort led him to do the same when he lost the election.

 

Trump truly believed that he won the election. That conviction was most likely fueled by his belief that Biden was not as formidable a candidate as Hillary Clinton on many grounds. After the election, Trump was faced with a dramatic choice: accept the result or fight on. 

 

Based on a life-time of experience he fought on. However, while doing so, he became increasingly disconnected from the smart shrewd judgments that had gained him the presidency and the leadership skills that had allowed him to make progress under very adverse circumstances.

 

The great social psychologist Kurt Lewin once noted that the same heat that melts the butter, fries the egg.

Trump’s ability to see outside the box and his psychological capacity to act on what he saw brought him the presidency and the successes he accomplishes. Fight back hard and keep pushing forward was a life -long learned recipe for success, and it worked—until circumstances changed and Trump’s paradigm for success didn’t.   

 

Trump ended his presidency as a victim of his own success.

 

 

 

 

           Shouldn't We Treat Every President Like a Real Person?: 

             Why psychoanalyses of politicians often miss the mark

 

One of the necessary but infrequently enlightening responsibilities of attempting to write a fair-minded, substantive analysis of a controversial president like Donald Trump is that one feels obligated to read and assess the enormous amount of what is presented as analysis but isn’t. It is tedious, frustrating work for one trained in the social sciences and psychoanalysis. There, validating theories with a range of carefully weighed evidence while considering and honestly investigating alternative explanations is at least the gold standard. Simply cherry-picking and interpreting facts to fit one’s beginning premises is the definition of confirmation bias and results in explanatory drivel.

The occasion of these observations is two recent entries in the long line of psychologically framed attacks on Mr. Trump that consist of putting this president on the analytic couch and politically assaulting him with Freud. The first article simply states as a fact: “Trump Is Losing His Mind.” It buttresses its identical starting premises and conclusions with highly speculative and misinformed assertions, presented as fact, from anonymously sourced news stories. 

As evidence, we are told, “The president is discussing martial law in the Oval Office.” Why? As a strategy to nullify the results of the election and stay in office. 

The anonymously sourced reporting of that story was that a White House meeting was held that included Sidney Powell, her client Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, two senior aides (White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows) and a number of other presidential aides filtering in and out of the meeting. The Times story contains no direct quotes. Rather, it links specific characterizations as being based on “one” or “two people,” “who were briefed on the meeting,” though not, importantly, physically present. 

The Times report is wholly taken up with Miss Powell’s suggestion that a special counsel be appointed to look into the election, a suggestion opposed by all of the president’s aides according to the anonymous sources “briefed on the meeting.” The martial law “discussion” is mentioned only once in the whole 1,300-word article. There, it is pointed out that Mr. Flynn in another interview had said, correctly it turns out, only that a president “could” declare martial law and that it “had happened.” The Times then reported, as if it were a fact, “At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.” No attribution whatsoever was presented for this statement, not from the “one” or “two” sources “briefed on the meeting.” 

Before one concludes that Mr. Trump has lost his mind, as the article states, it is prudent to ask several questions. Did Mr. Trump actually ask that question? Is a question, if asked, the same as a discussion? Is there any indication that Mr. Trump expressed seriousness, or any interest, in following through on his reported but not verified question? Has Mr. Trump publicly encouraged Republicans to vote against accepting the elector’s vote in Congress, as some Democrats did in 2017 against Mr. Trump?  

These and similar questions are not asked, much less answered. It would seem imprudent therefore to use this unexamined anonymously sourced report as the basis for speculations about the president’s mental health.

The second article is slightly more modest, adding a question mark to the question: “Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?” Before answering that question, it is again prudent to first ask: What do each of the following people have in common—Mary Trump, Bandy Lee, Barbara Rees, Tony Schwartz, Michael Cohen, Tim O’Brian, Wayne Barnett, Jack O’Donnell, and Dan Gable? Answer: They are almost all, with one exception, long-time anti-Trump activists that answer the articles’ title question with a resounding yes embedded in long quotations. That is a typical standard operating procedure for this author’s long list of anti-Trump psychological “analyses.”

The regret that one has in reading pieces like these, in addition to the frustration of having to repeatedly read the same baseless psychological speculations, is that they continue an unfortunate tradition of politicizing psychological analysis that began with Freud. He infamously, along with his former patient, William Bullitt wrote a universally panned psychoanalysis of President Woodrow Wilson.

Having apparently not learned their lesson, a substantial group of psychiatrists responded to a political tendentious set of questions designed to psychologically smear Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater published in the misnamed ˆFact Magazine. There the matter stood until all scholarly and political restraints were removed in the effort to do the same to Donald Trump.

The reason it’s worth the effort to clarify these issues is that the core of any president’s crucial national and international role is substantially self-defined. Its essence lies in making decisions, and these in turn rely on the choices he sees and/or prefers. Their foundation is his motivation and understanding, both a direct by-product of his adult character and identity. If we want to understand who a president really is, the skills and shortcomings he brings to that position, and the circumstances he confronts while in office, and what he wants or can do about them, there is no escaping a fair, clear examination and exploration of presidential psychology. 

This is not only knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It is knowledge for usefulness’s sake. If it is done right, it allows us all to have a better, more accurate, and therefore more realistic understanding of our country’s circumstances and the president’s. Expectations can then be adjusted. Demands can be moderated. And in so doing, commonalities can be sought rather than divisions exacerbated.  

A good first step going forward would be to treat Mr. Trump, and every president, as a real person, with a mixed package of abilities and limitations like the rest of us, rather than a psychological caricature and political piñata.

References

Warren Boronson.1964.  “What Psychiatrists Say about Goldwater,” FACT, 4:24-64.

Ralph Ginzburg. 1964. “Goldwater: The Man and the Myth,” FACT, 4:2

 

 

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.