From Russia, with Love

Whether he had something to say or not, he wanted to talk. He loved the sound of his own voice, the way people stopped what they were doing to listen to him when he talked. He wanted attention, wanted to command attention. He was good at that. Intuitively he understood that success in politics, to a considerable extent, depended on performative skills, on likability, on back slapping, on reading the mood of the people, on being able to track the ever-shifting political winds.

So what went wrong? Why whenever he tried to translate his undeniable people skills to the general arena, did he do so poorly? (First time he ran, in 1986, was a disaster for him. He had a campaign slogan, to know Joe Biden is to luveh Joe Biden) He wasn’t called 1% Joe for nothing. Part of the problem, as New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior pointed out, was that he knew from a very young age that he wanted to be in politics, that he wanted to be at the center of things that mattered, but just didn’t know what to run for. He was in a hurry to get wherever he was going- he just didn’t know where that was.

Out of a plethora of democratic candidates for the president of the United states, I ranked him only in the top six. I liked his tell-it-like-it-is transparency, his upbeat personality, his unfailing self-confidence. He didn’t seem afraid of anything or anyone. In his 50 years of patrolling the corridors of power at the highest level, there was nothing he hadn’t seen.

On the flip side, he was an irrepressible braggart, his favorite hashtag on just about anything that was discussed was “Yeah, but I got it done. “He ran his campaign on empathy. He didn’t use these words, but he made it crystal clear that unlike his Republican predecessors, he was warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely. He presented himself as so touchy-feely that to his dismay he became an early target of the emerging Me Too movement.

He was just too fond of rubbing the head, the shoulders and the back of well-wishers, that

At first, he resisted his minders who insisted that the times had changed, and that what was acceptable 50 years ago would no longer fly, to which Biden responded, I can’t change who I am now. But, change he did:

And from that moment on, he ceased to press flesh.

In addition to his lackluster, uninspired performance in his campaign, despite his slight but consistent lead in the early polling, was the disturbing fact that he didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind at his advanced age, of being in his late 70s, whether he even wanted to run again.

Things changed when his beloved son, Beau, who was dying of brain cancer, pleaded with his father on his deathbed, to run one more time. Was that the way, a desperate eleventh hour way, to forge a bond that could possibly endure into the afterlife? (One of their many commonalities was that they were both lifelong Catholics with more than a trace of mysticism in their soul)

Yes, Biden was not embarrassed when it came time to announce that he was throwing his hat into the ring. Because, this race was nothing less than the “race for the soul of America” which made it the most important race in the history of America… which by definition, given that America was the mother of all superpowers, that he was running for nothing less than the office of the supreme leader of the free world.

It didn’t matter that no one, perhaps not even Joe Biden, actually believed that. What mattered was that it sounded so good, that it looked so good. It was the photo op he had been searching for, dreaming about. It was the mission he had been rehearsing for much of life, that was finally big enough to engage him fully, so that Jennifer Senior, in her New York Times profile, could describe this Joe Biden as “Joe Biden, a Lion in His Prime,” someone who was a “furnace of ambition.”

Still, it didn’t help that increasingly Joe Biden ran a passionless campaign, that he looked increasingly old, that he seemed depressed, that in the teeth of the greatest pandemic (COVID- 19) that America has suffered in the last 100 years, that he had chosen to retreat to his bunker.

Furthermore, rumors circulated that his cognitive faculties, never his strong suit, were continually eroding, and that he would not be able to hold his own, to stand up to such a vicious, take-no-prisoners opponent as Donald Trump in the mandatory televised debate.

Something had to be done. Nancy Pelosi, quick as always to sense a power shift, called for an emergency meeting of her top advisors in the Democratic Party, which could no longer wait for Joe Biden to make up his mind. It was time to pick a candidate, to rally behind him or her, and to get down to business- which was a search and destroy mission, to make sure that his predecessor would never set foot in the oval office.

Mayor Pete, the youngest, most popular openly gay man to campaign for the white house, was first to answer the SOS call of Nancy Pelosi. He withdrew from the race, which he was one of the early front-runners, and promptly endorsed Joe Biden. Amy Klobechar and Elizabeth Warren soon followed his lead. The looming South Carolina primary was a turning point. Biden needed a convincing victory to maintain his perilous momentum. He got it.

It was the boost that Joe Biden needed, the boost he could not provide for himself, a boost that put him on a glide path — after fifty years of being an oval office also-ran, of being 1% Joe — straight to the presidency of the United States. Never one to not repay a favor, he nominated Kamala Harris as his running mate: if given the chance, he pledged to nominate the first black woman to be on the Supreme Court, a promise he recently fulfilled. He received additional help from his predecessor, the mad king, who became unmoored when Biden, as increasingly predicted, not only easily won the presidency, but won back the house, the Senate, with more popular votes than anyone in democratic history of the United States.

In retrospect, it seemed so easy. He had been castigated, at first, for being so likable. It was overlooked that in the right circumstances, high likability could be an invaluable asset. For one thing, likability implied trust: trust implied giving someone the benefit of doubt. That meant you could spare yourself the enormous effort of having to check and to recheck every thought, every step you had taken with a relative stranger in order to feel safe. You do not need to have a surrogate-to watch your back, to make sure that nothing had happened when you were not paying strict attention.

That first surrogate, as Eric Erickson taught us, was mother. We are watched over before we become watchers ourselves; By internalizing the process, we develop what is called basic trust;

The ability to take our first physical/emotional step, as we venture out into the fascinating strange world. In this sense, I think the trauma of Trump‘s presidency, the trauma that on so many levels America was forced to endure, by having to comprehend the profound shock of abandonment by a leader who seemed to have absolutely no interest in their welfare.

In that sense, someone like Biden announced he was in the race because it was for nothing less than the soul of America…. (how sweet that must have sounded to their ears)!

It meant not to have to interact, examine and personally test the good faith of your alleged leader

Biden did what he always does: hang tough. But he will not hang alone. On either side of him, in front of him and behind him, are Russians, Germans, Americans, English. There are also the souls of the Russian heroes of yore. They want peace too, but not peace at any price; not at the price of enslavement, of losing the right to self-determination. They say don’t poke the bear (especially don’t poke the Russian bear which has now just come out).

If they had to, the Ukrainians are ready to die with their boots on. Putin wants to return Russia to its former greatness: the greatness of what?

Of Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the desk of the UN?…

The greatness of Stalin’s Gulag in which an estimated 20 million people died in the 30s and 40s?

The greatness of the man who famously said “Murder is the solution of every political problem”?

To the Berlin Wall?

To the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Putin knows that he can not afford a nuclear confrontation. Biden is obsessed by his place in history. To the world at large though, nothing is less important than Biden’s place in history. What is important is the health and viability of Western Democracy when this confrontation is finally over.

Shortly before he died, Carl Sagan famously asked “who speaks for the earth?”

Given the state of the world now, the level of elevated stress, the constant elevated attention, the runaway rapaciousness, it seems to me that “rock solid, battle tested, steady-as-she-goes” Joe Biden is a good choice who deserves our support.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient: Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality. His new book is God and Therapy: What We Believe When No One is Watching