On Strength

Joe Biden's Legacy

Five Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member, and two former officials said the decision to recalibrate was prompted by Mr. Trump winning the Nov. 5 election, with concerns about an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.

—The New York Times

Canadian Public Safety Minister DOMINIC LeBLANC told CBC’s Rosemary Barton that Canada will make its border enforcement more “visible and muscular,” in the wake of Trump’s tariff threat partially due to immigration. LeBlanc said an announcement of more resources is likely in the days or weeks ahead.

—Politico

In the days before Joe Biden pardoned his gun-toting, crackhead, influence-peddling son, I was thinking about writing an evaluation of his sad presidency. I’ve always liked the guy, since I met him 37 years ago at a diner in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was campaigning, of course. I always thought of him as a really good politician, which is high praise in my book. He did a lot of good things as president—legislative things, administrative things. You will see the fruits of most of these—the infrastructure bill, the revivified American chip and defense industries, some of his green initiatives—in the years to come, as you may see Jay Powell’s Fed efforts to tamp inflation. His foreign policy was sound, if uninspired. Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan are patient, world-class diplomatic practitioners; they are owed the profound thanks of the American people. They kept us out of war. Donald Trump, if he had been president, would have had an equally hard time leaving Afghanistan (which he was impatient to do).

Biden was the sort of quarterback that football players call a “game manager,” as opposed to a game-changer. He was reliable. He wasn’t dynamic. He certainly wasn’t charismatic. He was stubborn, at times, but he was never strong. He didn’t inspire. He didn’t lead.

The notion of strength is crucial to this equation. It is at the core of successful executive leadership. Getting massive bills passed and pursuing creative diplomacy are acts of negotiation, a legislative sort of leadership that Biden trained for all his life. But there are few legislators who are said to be strong—Nancy Pelosi is certainly one, Mitch McConnell another. Public, overt strength is not a pre-requisite of success as a legislator; the ability to compromise is a form of genius, and it requires both charm and stubbornness, and a subtle cleverness—the only real leverage you have over your fellow legislators are committee assignments and, far more important, fund-raising for their campaigns. Both Pelosi and McConnell (and I should add Chuck Schumer) are dogged, relentless funders for their tribes.

Executive leadership is something else, though. It involves public risk-taking, stark decision-making, the direct use—or threat of—force and the ability to fire people. Joe Biden hasn’t fired anyone of note. That is truly remarkable. I don’t think I’ve seen another presidency like it. These are tough jobs; there is a revolving door that usually comes attached to the oath of office. But let me repeat: Biden fired no one. He didn’t fire Merrick Garland, whom he clearly disliked and who may have cost him the presidency by not unleashing Jack Smith at warp speed against Trump in 2021 (as Mitch McConnell clearly was hoping). Another president might have axed Lloyd Austin for his AWOL medical leave, an act of dangerous silliness. Another president might have axed Alejandro Mayorkas for not moving the Department of Homeland Security to the southern border and camping out there, and for not campaigning for serious punitive action when the immigrant gush began.

Donald Trump has a different philosophy. It is far more obnoxious. It is chesty and retributive and thoughtless to the point of danger; indeed, it is reflexive. He just can’t help it. But it is not entirely without merit, as the two items above—concerning Iran and Canada—indicate. It is rare that diplomacy can work without the palpable presence of strength…and those cases usually involve massive economic emollients. It may be that Trump’s threat of tariffs will backfire and bring on a recession, but it’s more likely those threats are a bargaining gambit, an opening move. In our hyperactive, attention deficit society, it takes a steamroller to create a public impression. Successful Presidents are known for their battles and their wins. Biden’s battles were almost all behind closed doors. His threats—well, you’ve had to look hard to spot them (he did threaten Iran, it seems; and Russia, too). He went to Kyiv, but didn’t pull a Reagan. He went to Jerusalem, and let Bibi Netanyahu walk all over him. If he had said—very publicly, after private threats—”Bibi, stop the killing in Gaza or you don’t get any more offensive weapons from us,” it might have hurt him among Evangelicals and Jews, but it would have conveyed the image of a much stronger, tougher leader to the American people—and they were desperately searching for one. The appearance of strength is a force multiplier.

Joe Biden rarely appeared strong. Although he celebrated the members of the military, appropriately, I never heard him say a word about the mess at the Pentagon. Everyone else from Bernie Sanders to Tom Cotton has. The defense budget has been allowed to slip drastically as a percentage of GDP; worse, much of what we spend, we waste. But Democrats don’t think much about the military. Harris tried to solve it with a single word: lethal. I kept waiting for the rest of the sentence. Campaigning with Lynn Cheney didn’t quite seal the deal—but it was better than nothing and the leftists who are now criticizing Kamala for doing it are fools. They do not know the meaning of the word: hero. They don’t think in those terms. Cheney is a hero of democracy. I was proud to vote the same way she did, for a change.

Weakness has become a congenital problem among Democrats—Pelosi excluded, perhaps (and certainly the Democratic members of the bipartisan House military caucus). Strong and tough and aggressive are adjectives often associated with the male of the species. The Democratic Party has, over the past fifty years, slowly and carefully expurgated those attributes from its lexicon. A great deal of good has come from this feminized sensibility—the unleashed creativity and success of women, minorities and homosexuals; social programs like Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. But all Trump had to do was wink-wink about smilin’ Kamala being handled—no, manhandled—by Putin and the message was sent to undecided voters. It would have been harder if Harris had threatened to enroll Ukraine in NATO—a negotiating trick, perhaps, but an actual god’s honest threat. She threatened nobody. Trump could tell all sorts of lies about criminals and maniacs coming across the border and people believed him—because they saw the photos and the film of the people streaming through the broken gates, an image that spoke volumes about American weakness, Biden’s weakness.

Clinton said no to Sistah Souljah. Barack Obama trashed his pastor. Biden allowed his crazies to romp, unpunished, unscolded. He couldn’t stop his LatinX Activists from promoting open borders. He couldn’t call out “anti-racists” for the racists they are. He never lectured Black Lives Matter on the black lives lost to black gang-bangers, not the police. He couldn’t say, as Peggy Noonan suggested, “No boys on girls teams.” He couldn’t even say, “None of this sex-change stuff for pre-pubescents.” He couldn’t say, in a blood-buzz of school shootings, not just “No more AR-15s” but also “Maybe we should reopen mental hospitals for violent schizophrenics and slam them shut” rather than allowing crazy loners to push people off subway platforms and mow down kids in playgrounds. (It’s not just the NRA to blame, though surely they are, it’s also ACLU that led the charge to close secure facilities for the violently ill in the 1970s.)

No, Biden was the ultimate permissive father—here’s where Hunter comes in—in a country nauseated by institutionalized permissiveness. His doddering presence fit the larger image: pop’s around the bend. I am not sure that Kamala could have done much better with a full running start because we are talking about the passive, sensitive, recumbent DNA of the Democratic Party here. And we are talking about its exact opposite, a lucky con-man, who raised his fist above his blood-spattered face with the American flag flapping in the background on a sunny summer day in Pennsylvania—if an image can win an election, that may have been it.

I feel bad for Joe Biden. He served our country well. But I don’t feel so bad for him as I might have had he not dallied in office and pardoned his son….which, among other things, gave balm to the Trumpers and to their seditious leader. They can now say: See, they’re all alike. Meaning Trump’s not so bad, by comparison; politicians are crooks.

Democracy dies in disdain for its leaders. So Biden’s pardon enables Trump further leverage to run wild. He has a bolstered rationale now to wreak havoc on American justice.

Sure, they’re all alike—the Trumpers will say—but at least he’s strong.

It’s cyber Monday, whatever that is. So you might consider giving The Gift of Sanity this holiday season. Certainly, you have friends and family who feel lost, adrift and way pissed off…like me. Please consider the Gift of Sanity.