JOE BIDEN

Half Way Home

Two years ago, shortly after Biden was elected President, I wrote an article entitled It’s Good to be The King, in which I gave my analysis and prognosis for what a Biden Presidency was going to look like. And now, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, I’d like to look back at what I got right and what I got wrong.

Here’s what I wrote two years ago: [as I wrote in It’s Good to be The King — excerpt from Gerald Alper —

‘Growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, my best friend was a brash, colorful Irishman. No less brash and colorful was my worst friend, someone who would let me down when I most needed him. Compounding the problem was that they were the same person and I never could tell which one was going to appear.

So I was drawn and repelled when Joe Biden (reluctantly) threw his hat in the ring for the 2020 presidential campaign. I liked his resoluteness, his constancy — “what you see is what you get.” I was wary of his advanced age (he was seeking to become what would be the oldest first-term president in American History), his lingering depression over the tragic death of his son, Bo, and his manifest ambivalence about the prospect of campaigning, yet again after two disastrous failures at running for president (his nickname 1% Joe was a direct reflection of just how poorly he had done when he campaigned at the national level). He had always known he wanted to be president, but he could not decide what exactly (other than for the democratic platform in the broadest sense) he was running for.

And then it hit him: as he announced on the eve of declaring his candidacy: he was running for nothing less than the soul of America. This, in effect, would be the most important election in the history of America. What made it so urgent was not his message, but his opponent. Donald Trump, coming from nowhere, coming from the la la land of reality TV, was the most malignant, threatening figure to emerge in decades. His win in 2016 was perhaps the greatest upset in American history. The prospect that he could be re-elected was not only unthinkable, it was unacceptable. He had to be stopped. From the day Trump got elected until the present, the overriding goal of the democratic party was not only to shut down Trump but to exorcize (what it saw as) the rapidly metastasizing cancer of Trumpism. In that sense, the Biden presidency from the start was a null presidency, a presidency with no viable positive goals. Its greatest goal was to impeach Donald Trump and indeed the outstanding achievement of the democratic congress. The day Nancy Pelosi broke out the Champagne bottles and clinked glasses and gave her best telegenic smile to the assembled cameras was the day the congress voted to send articles of impeachment to the senate (knowing there was absolutely no chance the Republican leader Mitch McConnell would ever allow the senate to pass it), meant to be a warning shot across the bow- the democrats are mad as hell at Trump’s antics (understandably) and not going to take it anymore — it came across as little more than a hand-waving show of impotent rage. Things changed in earnest when Biden, not only stopped Trump in his tracks but did it with panache. To her credit, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had chosen wisely when she decided to rally the democratic troops around Joe Biden’s drooping flag. She saw clearer than anyone else that Joe Biden- weary octogenarian Joe Biden- had something no one else had. He had credibility, he had recognizability, the kind you get from doggedly hanging around for half a century. It doesn’t sound like much, but if your opponent is a reality TV star, a born hustler, or a flimflam man by the name of Donald Trump, then it’s huge. Joe Biden was low risk.

Voting for Joe Biden was like voting for a nap. At the very least you’d catch up on your sleep and you won’t have bad dreams. It’s hard to overestimate what an advantage that was for the challenger. All he had to do was not make any outrageous gaffes, and he was sure to win. Trump would do the rest. No presidential candidate in the past 50 years came close to Trump when it came to self-imploding. It seemed too good to be true. When the story of the 2020 presidential election is written decades from now, people will realize how almost single-handedly Trump won the election for Joe Biden, but because they could not believe their good luck, because they had been so traumatized, so snake bitten by Trump’s upset win, they couldn’t leave it alone. They were too terrified to just sit tight with their winning hand, they had to cover every base, and plug every hole. It was unnerving that no matter how many blows he inflicted on himself, no matter how many blows were inflicted on him, he continued to stand.

Driving a stake in the heart of the Republican Frankenstein became the holy grail of the democratic party, which in my opinion is the main reason the democratic party, during the period 2016–2021, became perhaps one of the least productive in American History.

Few people agree with me, but once (as I wrote in 2016) Trump showed he was in earnest, not just about building a forty-foot steel wall along the southern border, but also about numerous, hitherto unimaginable, surreal-sounding plans- he was doomed. It was one thing to vote for a popular reality TV star (who was a political unknown), it’s another to vote for someone who’s been in office for four years, who has been an open book from day 1, who has repeatedly violated one hallowed presidential norm after another. So, while it was unthinkable to me that Trump could be reelected, many people found Trump weirdly entertaining (including me) but few (even among his followers) liked him and almost no one trusted him.

You do the math: one of the most widely-liked politicians goes head-to-head in a general election against one of the least respected. Who do you think is going to win? Nancy Pelosi did the math- quicker than anyone and never turned back. And, just as the numbers said. Joe Biden coasted to victory.

So. What went wrong?

The short answer is- not that he won but how he won. Joe Biden, in my view, ran the most wishy-washy, passionless, not to lose campaigns in the past fifty years. He played it safe in a way I had never seen before. His main message was: “I’m not Donald Trump.” He ran as he had always run, as a middle-of-the-roader. He was for anyone and for everything. If he won, then everyone would win. There was more than enough in the American Pie for everyone. No one would go wanting. His only problem seemed to be he was uncertain as to which direction he should go–the good old days of the twentieth century, which saw the end of segregation, the rise of a great society like a shining city on a hill, the promise of a new Camelot with hope in the air- or should we go forward into the slippery unknown, largely unexplored twenty-first century. The conflict is made more urgent by the elephant in the room-the fact Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are octogenarians who are aging visibly before our eyes. Which is it- are they on the brink of a (well-deserved retirement) or are they the standard bearers of a new order?

Something happened when Biden coasted to victory. Now that it was safe, he emerged from his bunker. He drank the kool-aid! Suddenly, someone who had run and been campaigning as a middle-of-the-roader for much of his political career, who was approaching his eightieth birthday, became radicalized. Not only would he get the energized progressives what they were demanding, but he would also go beyond their wildest dreams. He would propose the greatest social safety net in history. It is said, recently, Joe Biden looked at a photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and said “FDR….that’s the kind of president I would like to be.” In a matter of months, he had gone from being “folksy uncle Joe” to being a history-making FDR, a miraculous conversion that blindsided everyone (including me!).

In an economy flush with cash- a surplus of federal aid to fight Covid 19 and its metastasizing variants — drunk with power from defeating Trump and regaining control of the house and the senate (thanks to Trump) — the democrats spun out of control. An astounding three-trillion-dollar social safety net was proposed and quickly endorsed by the Democrats! It seemed almost too easy.

Report Card

Donald Trump was the most unelectable president (in my view) by far, in the past 50 years. On some level, Joe Biden has to have known that he was being gifted the presidency. To win, all he had to do was keep his penchant for gaffs to a minimum; to lay low; to play and not lose. Biden chose to take the low road. He sequestered himself in his bunker, practically disappearing from public view. Covid was the reason, he said. “I’m just doing what the docs tell me to do.”

It should be noted that the nomination for presidency happened to coincide with what Anthoney Fauci has recently called in the NY Times, “the worst national pandemic since the 1918 Flu.” This was the time when his former good friend, Governor Andrew Cuomo was waging the greatest political fight against a national enemy, Covid, anyone had seen in years. What did Cuomo actually accomplish with his daily television briefings?

Only this: he saves hundreds of thousands of lives by “changing the breathing habits of over 10 million New Yorkers, including myself and my wife. During the same time period, Joe Biden was in his own words, “staying in a bunker, occasionally throwing candy from the window of his bedroom to his grandchildren who regularly visited him daily.” As predicted, Joe Biden coasted to victory in spite of perhaps running the most passionless campaign in 50 years.

So how has he performed since becoming president? Well, I have to admit he did far better than I expected. Actually becoming President, something that he’d dreamed about since he was a little boy, seemed to wake him up. Now he didn’t just want to be a sitting president, he wanted to be a great one.

In other words, to everyone’s surprise, he wanted to go big. Nancy Pelosi, 81 years old with little time left to burnish her already considerable legacy, also decided to go big. When a major political party like the Democrats put their shoulder behind a candidate, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. A three trillion dollar social network bill was proposed and pushed through at warp speed. How much of that shall survive is problematic. As NY Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman recently noted, only Joe Biden could have gotten the Republicans and Democrats together the way that he did. And he deserves credit for that.

That said, the Achilles Heel of Joe Biden’s administration at the halfway mark, without a doubt, is Vladimir Putin. In a brief meeting with Putin, whom Biden has known for decades, Biden tried and failed to get the slightest reassurance from Putin that they would agree not to resort to nuclear weapons to settle their differences. Deeply dissatisfied, Biden, looking Putin in the eye, said, “You have no soul.” “You’re right,” smiled Putin.

True to his word, shortly after this meeting, Russia invaded Ukraine, initiating a running, nine-month ground war, of what has been called the greatest land war in Europe since the Second World War. In short, Biden is in over his head (as is Putin.) America owes Biden a vote of thanks.

Biden, who is essentially a born politician; a people-pleaser; a natural, flesh-pressing, When Irish eyes are Smiling good fella with a megawatt smile that won’t quit. That said, it is time for the Democrats to pave the way for his successor. Biden has to go. The politics that blossomed with Watergate; of insatiable self-interest, of toxic masculinity; of revenge-seeking, toxic, Me Too (j’accuse) has to end. The nuclear arms race less than 75 years old, has run its course. Unless, if you’re fortunate enough to avert a nuclear winter, all nuclear weapons must be destroyed and forever banned.

The politics of partisanship, unrestrained self-interest, and of revenge-seeking femininity; has to be replaced by what has been called the politics of meaning, based and grounded in all-inclusive, humanist, existential values.

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).