Joe Biden and America’s new sentimentalism
America is an already-sentimental nation whose culture displays the good and bad traits evoked by that term. So much of its great art – think Rockwell, Hopper, or even Springsteen and Tarantino – moves nimbly between the sublime and the kitsch, the high and low, the meaningful and the meaningless. So, too, does its politics. Kennedy became a greater president in death than he was in life thanks to a process of acute sentimentalisation around Jackie O and Camelot.
The cause of this is less clear. Perhaps Americans lack that foreboding sense of history (or class) that curtails European sensibilities. It nurtures optimism and a chance to find value in new kinds of aesthetic or life experience. When the British sent Beagle 2 to Mars, it went wrong in a way that merely fed our cynicism (“What were we thinking getting into the space race?!”). America sends the Perseverance Rover to Mars and they find value in even the slightest failure, such as in Monday’s press conference, when Dave Gruel, the lead engineer in charge of the landing cameras, described his disappointment that the microphone recording the landing had failed during entry.
Gruel told a touching story of how the sister of a visually impaired space fan had told him how much the audio would mean for their sibling. He described his disappointment that he couldn’t convey the magnitude of the achievement to that audience. Except he could. The twist in the story was that another microphone was working and, even better, they now had the first audio recorded on the surface of Mars…
“I invite you now to just close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on the surface of Mars listening to the surroundings,” he said before playing the audio… which sounded exactly like somebody blowing into a microphone.
It was minimally impressive compared to the video which had preceded it of the rover descending from the “Skycrane”, but the sentiment of the backstory had proved too seductive. How could NASA not share that audio given that story?
Sentiment always runs the risk of edging into sentimentality and it is a tendency we can already see in the current occupant of the White House. Trump eschewed emotion (he even mocked Chuck Schumer for crying) whereas Biden preaches sentiment, humility, and public service. “For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people” he told a CNN town hall just last week.
With that humility comes compassion. Biden’s appeal – and, less kindly, a limit to that appeal – rests in the empathy he shows to a nation that has now seen over 500,000 people die from Covid-19. Speaking from the White House on Monday, alongside his wife, Gill, and Kamala Harris with husband Doug Emhoff, Biden equated grief to “that black hole in your chest. You feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse. The anger. The questions of faith in your soul.” It was a moment of heightened solemnity, with 500 candles lit in front of the White House, each symbolising a thousand lives lost. The speech was only diminished by the fact that Biden has spoken about grief in these exact terms so many times before, often in deeply political settings.
Most memorably, he’d appeared on MSNBC on 22 January 2020, at a point just before the first of the primaries, when his campaign was struggling. It had been something of a softball interview that appeared purposefully designed to get Biden to speak to his strengths. We didn’t know about the pandemic at the time, but Biden was obviously best when channelling real emotions relating to the loss of his son, Beau. The words of The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin from this week could well have been written back then: “Biden’s words are so touching, so human. He understands the role of mourner in chief.”
It does, indeed, feel like America elected the best candidate for that role, but one might wonder how long Biden will remain the man for the moment. How long might America cherish a president almost singularly defined by his compassion? Not to downplay the significance of his suffering – the tragedies in the President’s life are greater than most people’s – but Biden has always walked a fine line between sentiment and the sentimental, between the heartfelt and the afficted. Outside the language of grief (where cynicism admittedly feels misplaced), Biden can sound comical, burdened by doohickey-isms and pure old fashioned “malarkey”. It made sense to embrace his anachronisms during the campaign (“that’s just Joe being Joe”), turning a weakness into a virtue, but it was his ability to empathise that defined the run-up to November’s election. He found a tone that he has now carried through to the presidency. Yet one wonders how he will transition out of this role. How does he avoid the fate of Sir Winston Churchill, who came to be too closely identified with one crisis?
The ceremonial tells us little about this administration going forward. Nor can we read much into its promises, which, thus far, are no stronger than Biden’s threat to fire “on the spot” anybody in his administration showing disrespect to others (yet it took days before press aide, TJ Ducklo, resigned after threatening a journalist). How Biden deals with Iran and North Korea will tell us more, as will the final contents of the Covid Relief Bill, but we might also have learned a little from the appearance of Merrick Garland before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
Despite Biden’s proclivity towards the sentimental, Garland had been a surprise pick for Attorney General. He had been Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court before his confirmation was blocked in the Senate in the final year of the Obama administration. There was talk about there not being enough time – shown to be meaningless by the speed of the Amy Comey Barratt confirmation – but the reality was that the politics just hadn’t lined up for Obama.
Yet if Garland’s abandonment felt like a loose end, then his nomination for AG feels like a romantic attempt to tie it up. It was emotional too as he generated headlines on Monday for a reply he gave to Cory Booker, who had asked him about his family’s understanding of persecution. Garland choked up, speaking movingly about his own family’s flight from Nazi persecution and the debt he feels he owes the United States. “I feel an obligation to the country to pay back and this is the highest best use of my own set of skills to pay back.”
It was memorable, certainly, but also an unnecessary distraction. Booker knew the anecdote and clearly hoped to elicit a response, knowing how it would play to a wider audience. The anecdote was heartfelt, but its place within the testimony contrived. Democrats might cherish this kind of biography, but it hardly helps us see how they will govern or indicates focus and intent.
Democrats need to prove themselves serious people and Garland offered something of that in his testimony. His was an uncomplicated sense of decency that is sure to attract bipartisan support. His work around 1995’s Oklahoma City Bombing makes him suited to head a Justice Department taking the threat of domestic terrorism seriously but more important was the tone he set. He described how he would be the “lawyer for the people of the United States” and was careful to explain his relationship to the White House – “I would not have taken this job if I thought that politics would have any influence over prosecutions and investigations”. Sober, measured, and, at times conceding ground to Republicans, he offered testimony that was neither sentimental nor its opposite, which is that gruff indifference conveyed by so many of Trump’s appointees but most notable in the previous proper AG (there have been three acting since), William Barr.
In his unassuming way, Garland offered a better embodiment of Bidenism than even Biden himself offers, if by that we mean a return to government run by serious people. This is why Joe Manchin is saving Democrats from their own worst instincts by opposing the nomination of Neera Tanden to the Office of Management and Budget and, conversely, why Biden is not well served by Kyrsten Sinema presiding over the Senate wearing a shirt emblazoned with the slogan “dangerous creatures” (an abbreviation of “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”) Simply arguing that Republicans did worse is no justification for poor standards in public figures. Politicians are elected to take the business of government seriously and that remains the Democrat’s best chance of holding onto power in four years’ time.