No One Sees Joe Biden as a Savior — That’s a Good Thing
Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. in 2021.
That brief list encapsulates the magnitude of the emergency confronting the new President. Seven states had seceded from the Union when Lincoln took the oath of office. Seventy-two Marches later, FDR was inaugurated at the nadir of the Great Depression, with the banking system in total collapse and at least a quarter of the workforce unemployed. In January 2021, Biden faces an overwhelming constellation of crises. Among them: the worst pandemic in a century, which was totally mishandled by his predecessor and is killing four thousand Americans a day, an economy teetering on the precipice of a new depression, millions of Americans motivated by racist hate fanned by the outgoing occupant of the White House, an American nation with its worldwide reputation and respect in tatters as a result of four years of Trumpism, massive federal deficits, an extraordinary maldistribution of wealth and income, the existential threat to the planet posed by climate change … and a large minority of the population blindly attached to an authoritarian leader who incited an invasion of the Capitol by a violent mob of terrorists intent on ending democracy.
Lincoln and FDR came to be viewed as the two greatest American presidents. Who would place Joe Biden in their league? Does anyone see him as a savior?
The lies of Trump and many in his party notwithstanding, Biden won the November election by a large margin It is clear, though, that far more people were voting against Trump than for Biden. Many indicated that they were just not that into Joe. Such statements as “He just doesn’t excite me” were common.
The pandemic prevented Biden from campaigning normally, but if he had, he would not have been greeted, as John F. Kennedy was during the 1960 campaign, by young women who leapt in the air as JFK passed. Kennedy received what was described as an “orgiastic welcome” from as many as 1,250,000 people in New York City. JFK had come to be seen, as a southern senator put it, a combination of “the best qualities of Elvis Presley and Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
During the 2008 campaign, Valarie Jarrett said to Barack Obama, “You’re the new ‘in’ thing.” Plainly, Joe Biden is neither new nor “in.” Hardly anyone sees him as a knight in shining armor ready quickly to save America’s damsels and dudes in distress.
That’s a good thing.
Another president remarked before he assumed office that he worried about “the exaggerated idea people have conceived of me. They have a conviction that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my capacity,” Herbert Hoover said. “If some unprecedented calamity should come upon the nation,” he feared, “I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who expected too much.”
Believing that a candidate will be a savior is a prescription for disillusionment and cynicism. Millions saw Obama as the Second Coming — if not of Jesus, at least of FDR. The Nobel Committee ludicrously awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to Obama less than nine months after he took office. Many of the nearly two million people who attended the 2009 Inauguration were expecting a whole new world to emerge overnight. That worried Obama. “It would be impossible to meet the outsized expectations now attached to me,” he writes in A Promised Land. “So what would happen when change didn’t come fast enough? How would these cheering crowds respond to the inevitable setbacks and compromises?” Less than two years later, many of those who had pinned enormous hopes to Obama were complaining that he had failed to stand up for, at the very least, a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act. Had they not seen Obama as superhuman, they might have realized and appreciated that the creation of the ACA was, as Joe Biden said to the President at the signing ceremony, “a fucking big deal.”
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Joe is no Lincoln or FDR, you say? Fair enough. But before they became president, neither were they. Lincoln received less than 40 percent of the votes in a four-way race in 1860 and public confidence in his capacity to deal with the secession crisis was not large. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader,” Walter Lippmann famously wrote in 1932.” He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”
Millions of Americans fervently hoped that Roosevelt could guide the country out of the desperate situation it was in when he took office in 1933. The same is the case with Biden 88 years later, but in neither instance was the incoming president widely seen as miracle worker. Roosevelt did, to be sure, have two advantages over Biden: a considerably larger fraction of the country ready to move in a new direction and much larger Democratic majorities in Congress.
The most important quality Roosevelt had for taking the reins during very bad times, though, is one that Biden also possesses. Much as the life experiences of Roosevelt suited him so well to be a national leader during the Great Depression, those of Biden make him the person to lead during the multiplicity of crises the nation faces today.
Having been afflicted by infantile paralysis gave FDR an experience with suffering that enabled him to relate with the suffering of people during the Great Depression in ways that he, a child of privilege, could not otherwise have done. “Having been to the depths of trouble,” his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, noted, “he understood the problems of people in trouble.”
Similarly, Joe Biden’s life of extraordinary loss and grief — lowlighted by the 1972 deaths of his first wife and daughter in a car crash and the agonizing cancer death of his son Beau in 2015 — have made him an extraordinarily empathetic man. His compassion (a trait totally absent in his predecessor) gives him a strong identification with the suffering millions of Americans are experiencing from the pandemic and accompanying economic collapse.
In 1933, a man who was paralyzed but nonetheless had persisted gave hope to a paralyzed nation. In 2021, a man who has experienced extraordinary anguish but nonetheless kept going offers hope to an anguished nation.
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Great Expectations are usually followed by Great Letdowns.
Modest expectations can be followed by substantial accomplishments.
No one expects Biden to lead us into the Promised Land. He — and we — should be glad that those who voted for him are not caught up in 2021 with what Obama reminds us Sarah Palin said so many people were with him in 2009: “hopey, changey stuff.”
That circumstance may offer the best hope for change.
Is any of the foregoing to say that JRB will become another FDR? Of course not. But it is far better not to see new leader as a superhero and be pleasantly surprised by how much he or she accomplishes than to expect the impossible and be disenchanted.
{Historian Robert S. McElvaine teaches at Millsaps College and is the author of ten books, including The Great Depression. His latest book, “The Times They Were a-Changin’ — The Long 1964 that Redefined America & Drew the Battle Lines of Today,” will be published by Arcade in November.}