Extraordinary Joe: President Biden could be one of America’s great crisis leaders
So, he’s finally done it – after a tense thriller on election night and a drawn out counting process, Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States on 20 January 2021.
How likely is it that Biden will make a great President? The answer is, he might just surprise you. It’s not that we should expect him to do “great” things – he’s no FDR, or JFK (thank God), or even LBJ. But as JRB – the “R” is for Robinette – he will, from Day One, begin to undo the accumulated madness of the Trump years.
He doesn’t have to aim for the stars. The “shining city on a hill” will always be out of his reach. His goal must simply be to turn America around, away from darkness and towards the light. If he gets there, if the country quietens down and foreign leaders can look once more to Washington without shuddering, he will have earned his niche in history, retiring after a single term in office and handing over to his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to carry his legacy into the 2024 contest.
Presumably he will appoint a strong, centrist cabinet whose principal aim, other than containing and defeating the coronavirus, will be to reconnect America with its better impulses. At the same time, he will hope to become the President who reclaims his place as Leader of the Free World.
There is a chance, of course, that he will die before he gets a chance to do much of anything, in which case the Harris years will start early. He will be 78 when he takes the oath of office and is no longer the sharpest tack in the box – if, indeed, he ever was. Like most men in their seventies (I should know), he gets confused sometimes and trips over his words. During the last week of the campaign, he vowed to beat, er … George Bush at the polls. He is a man of his time, born during the last hours of the Battle of Stalingrad, and if he’s not careful or relies too much on what worked once upon a time, he may be tempted to bring the analogue thinking of the 1970s and 1980s to the problems of the digital age.
Last Saturday, he addressed a rally in Michigan, one of the swing states he had to win to secure election. His warm-up man was his old boss Barack Obama, who was not so much a great President as a great candidate. It was as if Bruce Springstein had been the support act for Frankie Avalon. Obama, looking sharp in an aviator jacket, blew Biden away, but the older man didn’t seem to mind. He just worked his way through his script and milked the applause, promising the Motown crowd that he was with them and would make sure that they, not Wall Street or the super-rich, would be the principal beneficiaries of the Biden years.
One of the better lines he came up with was that Americans during his time in office wouldn’t have to listen all day every day to the President telling them what he was up to. “They’ll know I’m in the White House, working.”
During his eight years as Vice President, Obama treated Biden as a key adviser, with a role that encompassed the Senate (his old stomping ground), the State Department and the West Wing. Few Presidents have come better prepared for the task ahead.
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Apologists for Donald Trump, as he retires, spitting venom and crying foul of a “stolen election”, point to the fact that, prior to Covid-19 – which he got so spectacularly wrong – he presided over three years of unbroken economic growth. But so did Obama (and Biden) before him, and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In fact, more jobs were created in the last three years of Obama’s second term than in the first three years under Trump.
During the two-month transition from Trump to Biden – a period expected to be unusually fraught – much time will be devoted to the best means of containing and defeating Covid-19. A new federal team will be established, to work under the direction either of the Vice President or a specifically mandated cabinet member, operating in close cooperation with the states and city mayors. Biden knows that resolving the health crisis will be the first and greatest test of his leadership. He has to be able to show results within the first 100 days, leading to the elimination of the virus by the end of the summer or, at the latest, before the start of the 2020-21 football season.
In his inaugural address – to be delivered on 20 January – he is expected to recommit the US to the Paris climate accords, reassure foreign leaders that “normalcy” has been restored to the White House and outline the measures he proposes to take to protect the environment and push back against global warming. Fortunately for the auto industry, his moderate green agenda will include federal support for electric cars and the establishment across the nation of a network of second-generation charging stations.
On tax, he is clear. No one earning less than $400,000 a year (more than 90% of all taxpayers) need fear the predations of the Internal Revenue Service, he claims. The rich, however, and big corporations can expect to pay substantially more. Biden is no socialist, any more than he is an anarchist who wishes to abolish the police or, equally, an authoritarian who is eager to send in special forces to break up Black Lives Matter demonstrations. But he does believe that the rich and the super-rich have been getting away with it for too long and that the time has come for a reckoning.
A large chunk of the increased tax revenue will be spent on roads, railways and bridges. America’s infrastructure, built mainly in the second and third quarters of the last century, has been crumbling for years. Biden intends to remedy this, bringing the transportation system up to date while creating millions of construction jobs.
To this end, he will require the support of Congress. He is guaranteed the House, led by 80-year-old Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but without a functioning majority in the Senate he could find himself stymied as effectively as Obama was after the mid-term elections in 2014 that transferred the whip-hand from the President to the Republicans’ Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell.
Checks and balances are built into the American system in a way that is not fully appreciated in the winner-takes-all democracies of Britain and Europe. The voters giveth and the voters taketh way, guaranteeing incoming administrations just two years in which to get things done.
Biden’s foreign policy is likely to be pragmatic. On China, he and Trump are not far apart, the chief difference being that the new man can be expected to deploy more diplomatic language and a greater measure of consistency. The aim will be to restore balance to the trade equation and to convince Beijing that a new Cold War is not inevitable.
No problems there, then.
Europe, in the shape of the EU and Nato, will not be top of Biden’s to-do list. But he has indicated that good relations with Paris and Berlin are important to him and that a fresh round of trade talks with Brussels will begin in earnest as soon as practicable. The President agrees with his predecessor that Nato is not the military equivalent of Marshall Aid, but must be financed on an agreed, multilateral basis. He will show goodwill. He will smile and nod, especially while the Covid crisis continues to rage. But in the longer-term he will expect Europe to dig deeper into its pockets for its own defence.
To the British, Biden is likely to prove frustrating. He has nothing intrinsically against the UK, which he acknowledges has been a reliable ally down the years. Yet, as a proud Irish-American, and a Catholic Irish-American at that, he will be in Dublin’s corner when it comes to relations between Britain and the EU and the consequences for Ireland in the event of No-Deal Brexit. In particular, he has made clear that if the UK and the EU end up trading under WTO rules and Boris Johnson then invokes the existing NI clauses of his Internal Market Bill, talks on trade between Washington and London will not even make it to the starting gate.
And then there is one of the most fraught questions in American politics – race. Biden has been grappling with black and minority issues all his adult life. When he was a boy, there was segregation in the South and Martin Luther King’s dream of equality lay decades in the future.
Today, in spite of successive legislative reforms, the country remains divided into those who either embrace racism or regard it as an overblown concern and those who see it as a festering wound. The new President is no revolutionary. But he is a realist. He knows that the police right across America have to be persuaded that seeing a young black man “act suspicious” doesn’t have to end with the suspect shot dead or in handcuffs with an officer’s knee on his neck.
If Biden fails to convince his black fellow citizens that he understands the problem and is ready to do what’s necessary, then the prospect, post-Trump, even in the middle of the coronavirus, is of a long, woke winter of discontent.
All in all, it is a lot to take on for a man who was already ten years-old when Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency. He has been left so many pieces to pick up that he could easily find himself doing nothing else. But if he succeeds and bequeaths a clear political space to his successor, it will be a rare case of a presidential mission actually being accomplished.
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Biden has come a long way in a long time. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 20, 1942, which means he will be 80 years-old by the time the Republicans come back at him in the mid-terms of 2022. His father, Joe Senior, was in the oil business but had fallen on hard times during the Great Depression so that, by the time of Joe’s birth, the family had moved in with his mother-in-law. Things didn’t improve when the war ended, and in 1953 they left for neighbouring Delaware, where Joe Sr. discovered a talent for real estate, enabling him to put all three of his children through college.
At school, Biden was a “jock”. He played gridiron and baseball. His studies suffered and he was consistently in the bottom quartile of his class. But he was popular and seen as a leader, as jocks at that age often are. Somehow, with his father’s support, he made it into college, where he dropped sports but continued to under-perform, emerging 506th out of 688 in his class and going on to law school, where he qualified in 76th place out of 85.
During his college years, he applied for at least four student deferments that meant he didn’t have to serve in Vietnam. He later used the fact that he had suffered from asthma as a teenager to be declared unsuitable for military service except in a national emergency. Probably for this reason, he never refers to Trump’s “bone spur,” the alleged condition that famously kept the future POTUS from being conscripted, preferring to stress that his son, Beau, was a “war hero,” who spent a year in uniform in Iraq.
As a newly-qualified lawyer in the tiny, one-horse state of Delaware, Biden could have spent the next 40 years quietly making money. Instead, he found he had a hankering for politics. His father was a Republican, and Joe Jr was all set to follow suit when he realised that, out of sympathy for the little guy, he was more attracted to the Democratic ticket.
In 1969, aged 27, while working in a local law firm as a public defender, he was elected to the council in Delaware’s Newcastle County, which also contains within it the state capital, Wilmington. As a councillor, supplementing his income as an attorney with cash earned from real estate management, he advocated for improved public housing and opposed the extension of major highways into residential districts. So far, he was an ordinary upcoming small-town lawyer dabbling in local public service.
It was what happened next that marked him out and changed everything.
The magnificently-named J Caleb Boggs was up for re-election to the US Senate, in which, following two terms as governor of Delaware and three in the House of Representatives, he had served for the previous 12 years. Boggs was a much decorated war hero, having, as a young officer, fought all the way from the invasion of Normandy, through the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald.
As governor, Boggs was considered a moderate who had abolished the death penalty and introduced strict measures to protect the environment. No one thought Biden had a chance. But, campaigning from door to door, on a platform of ending the war in Vietnam, improving healthcare, increasing taxes on the rich and generally ending “politics as usual,” he scored a sensational victory.
It was at this point that tragedy struck. In 1966, Biden had married Neilia Hunter, whom he had met while at law school. They had three children, Beau, the eldest, Hunter and Naomi. But on December 18, 1972, after winning election to the Senate but before he had taken his seat, his wife and daughter were killed in a road accident. His two sons were injured, but both recovered.
Biden was devastated and resolved to abandon politics to take care of his remaining family. Friends and party officials dissuaded him from this course, but instead of renting an apartment in Washington, he returned home from the Capitol each evening by train, a practise he continued for the next 36 years.
The US Senate prides itself on being the “world’s foremost deliberative body”. In reality, it is a cathouse, from which a minority emerge as movers and shakers while the rest spend their time, in between representing special interests and raising money for their re-election, looking ahead to a second career as lobbyists. Biden decided early on that he wanted to be a mover and shaker – though this never prevented him, then as now, from accepting large campaign donations – and subsequently cast around for causes to champion.
For a while, he toyed with domestic issues: consumer protection, clean air, civil rights, a better deal for the elderly. In 1981, having worked his way up, he became ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was one of those behind the notorious Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, with the best of intentions, brought all kinds of petty crimes and misdemeanours within the federal remit, increasing the prison population and extending sentences passed for relatively minor offences. In fairness, Biden came to regret his part in the Bill’s passage and was one of those who later amended some of its harsher provisions.
The younger Biden, though a practising Catholic, accepted Roe v. Wade, the case decided by the Supreme Court that underpins what became known as a woman’s right to choose, but it wasn’t until 2010, as Vice President, that he gave his blessing to gays in the military and same-sex marriage. It was the same with drugs. Having stared out as a lock-em-up hawk, he now supports the decriminalisation of cannabis and the expunging of past convictions for its use.
Has he genuinely had changes of heart on these issues, or was he simply moving with the times? We may never know. Come to that, he may never know.
On foreign policy, which he increasingly made his specialism, often working across the aisle with Arizona’s John McCain, Biden travelled the world, meeting with hundreds of foreign leaders and chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee on relations with Europe. He was prominent among those who pressed the Clinton Administration to intervene in the Balkans wars, and in 2003, having supported the post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, he called for the “elimination” of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who he believed was set to unleash his “weapons of mass destruction”.
As Vice President, having been co-opted by Obama as an old white guy to balance his own young black guy persona, Biden didn’t so much grow into the job as occupy the space. Twice he had run, unsuccessfully, for the country’s top office (in 1988 and 2008) via the Democratic Party nomination. This time he was lucky. Wherever Obama went, there was an inevitable crackle of electricity. Biden “grounded” him. He knew where the bodies were buried, who to tap and who to ignore.
The task facing both men was tough. The 2008 financial crash had upended the American Dream, throwing millions out of work and creating a nationwide crisis for homeowners. Biden was strong in his support of the auto industry, which had been hit particularly hard, but was less enthusiastic about bailing out the banks. He worked hard on the former and bit his lip on the latter.
Later, with crisis averted, or at any rate contained, he threw himself one hundred per cent into the fight for universal healthcare reform. Obamacare, when it finally passed, sneaking under the mid-term wire, was very much Obama’s creation, but would probably not have succeeded without his deputy’s hard work in the House and Senate.
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But that was then and this is now. From January forward, Biden has to be master in his own house. Two women will make his task easier. The first is his younger sister, Valerie, a leading media consultant, who has masterminded his political campaigns all the way back to 1969 and who he says has been his best friend his entire life.
His second stalwart is his wife, Jill, a former teacher, whom he married in 1977, five years after the death of his first wife, Neilia. Jill Jacobs, from Pennsylvania, met Joe on a blind date organised by Biden’s brother, Frank. They hit it off almost immediately and have remained together for the last 43 years. Jill – universally seen to be a class act – became the adoptive mother of Beau and Hunter, adding a sister, Ashley, to the family and helping her husband thrive in the socially-competitive world of Washington DC.
Jill Biden has seen her husband though many vicissitudes, notably including those relating to his two sons, Beau and Hunter. Beau Biden was a source of immense pride to his father. A highly-rated lawyer, he helped train judges in post-war Kosovo; as an officer in the Delaware National Guard, he was deployed to Iraq for 12 months, winning the bronze star. Upon his return to the US, he entered state politics and, after serving two terms as Delaware’s attorney-general, was planning to run for Governor when he was diagnosed with a non-operable brain tumour. He died on May 30, 2015, aged just 46.
Hunter Biden is very different kettle of fish, to put it politely. A legally-trained investor, he has worked in various countries around the world, trading, it is said, on his father’s name. It was Hunter Biden’s involvement in the murky world of Ukrainian low politics that led to Donald Trump’s impeachment last year by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Trump had made military aid to Ukraine contingent upon the Government in Kiev coming up with “dirt” on the former Vice President’s son.
Whatever dirt there may have been remained hidden, but rumours have continued to abound in connection with lobbying in China. Hunter Biden has been married twice. He has children from each marriage as well as from a relationship with a South African filmmaker. His career in uniform was short-lived. Not long after being commissioned into the Navy, he was dismissed from the service for drug-taking.
The Trump campaign tried – and failed – to make allegations of scandal the centrepiece of its effort to take Biden down. But Biden just kept going, ignoring the insults and sticking to his message that there is a better way to conduct the nation’s affairs, as he had when he beat angry Bernie Sanders in the primaries campaign.
When the Democrats needed someone from the party’s mainstream to see off the Democrat left and then take on Trump in a down to earth manner capable of winning back voters in the industrial and post-industrial states, they turned to Joe from Scranton, an ordinary Joe with an extraordinary story. It worked.
Whatever charges may be laid against Joe Biden, no one could say that he has not experienced the darker side of life. He has been in the public eye in America for almost 50 years, plying his trade under no fewer than eight Presidents. If he can just hold out and stick the pace for another four years, he may yet enter political legend as the man who restored a little lustre to the Oval Office after the grotesqueries of Donald Trump. After all, how hard can it be?