A Regular Joe

A Regular Joe

Four weeks from tomorrow will be an historic day for sure. I started my voting life while a college student in what seemed like a similarly monumental election. We were trying to mobilize a generation to move away from what we of that generation thought was an untrustworthy leader. We were at war and it was a very unpopular war. And of course, we all know now that Richard Nixon was, indeed a bad and untrustworthy president. And the war that we had in Southeast Asia may have ended, but we have more than made up for it with Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaida and now the combination of domestic terror (heavily spurred on by white supremacy groups), racial profiling and showing black lives indifference and now, the Coronavirus pandemic. We may not have liked the way Nixon conducted the Vietnam (and surrounding countries) War. We may not have liked the way President Cheney (I mean Bush W.) fabricated justification for pushing into Iraq to kick Saddam Hussein’s ass, no matter how badly it may have needed kicking. But none of us (save perhaps Jane Fonda) were working actively to help the opposition. But now we have a president who takes pride in sidling up to Putin, Kim Jung-Un, Jair Bolsonaro, the Proud Boys, Assault rifle-toting racist renegade vigilantes, and, the most insidious of all, the virus that is raping and pillaging our nation disproportionately based on the benign neglect and active medical misdirection Donald Trump feels he has had to declare and execute.

In other words, the worst I can say about the previously worst President in my voting life is that he did things to others that we (as in many of us Americans) preferred he not do, but Donald Trump has been actively doing these dastardly things directly to us, not others. He is universally known to represent merely his “base” and not the nation as a whole and explicitly not the people or groups that are Americans, but who do not agree with him. This is a new approach never before so boldly evidenced by an American president. He is not content to try to eliminate Americans who are less than perfectly documented, and exclude Americans from the Census by virtue of cutting the data-gathering process short, and blatantly trying to disenfranchise large swaths of the American population. He is actively trying to redefine who is the “We” of the American citizenry that deserve to be part of “The People”.

Back during the Obama presidency we all got to know a bit about Joe Biden in his role as Vice President. I am not sure why Obama originally chose Biden as his running mate, but it was clear that there was some regional diversity achieved (adding Delaware to Illinois) and that there was a “moderate” label that attached to Biden, not to mention the subtle sense of having an older white guy on the ticket to keep the radical potential of a smart black man in optical check. The general sense of the man was that he was affable and reasonable. He was seen as a king of the art of compromise and in many ways a career politician who was the Washington insider that Obama was not. Over the eight-year term of the Obama presidency, Biden did not waver from this mild-mannered and affable image and did not seem to rise into the spotlight in any seriously negative manner. There certainly was some empathy for his loss of his son Beau and some consternation over the global shenanigans and drug addiction of his other son Hunter, but other than the salacious and dime-store drama elements of his family, there was no scandal. Biden was simply Joe.

In 2016 we all watched Hilary and the machinery of the Democratic Party (clearly heavily favoring the Clinton family juggernaut) roll over Biden, with his friendly and somewhat feeble effort to gain the presidential nomination, in the primary process. I remember in 1994 listening to Vernon Jordan, who had just finished his job as Chairman of Bill Clinton’s Transition Committee (Jordan was a Director of my firm, Bankers Trust, and would speak at various functions we held), saying that Hilary was MUCH more respected and powerful in the Democratic Party machine than was President Clinton before his election. It is not surprising to me that Hilary won the nomination against Biden, though I can’t say how that machinery worked for her relative to Bernie Sanders. What is clear was that good old Joe was no lo contendere in that process.

When the 2020 election process was shaping up in 2019 and all the new blood like O’Rourke, Harris, Buttigieg, Yang and others as well as the old blood like Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg wee jockeying for position, Biden stood by the sidelines until late April before deciding to throw his hat in the ring. I can remember feeling ambivalent about that event since I tend to prefer newer and more progressive faces for leading the ticket. My thoughts on presidential preference are notably different from my views on candidate preference. What I mean by that is that the issue of electability tended to overwhelm my personal preferences for who would do the job the best. At the time Joe Biden just didn’t rise to prominence on my job preference list though he ranked higher in terms of electability because of his moderate or centrist views and the fact that the American electorate was more familiar and comfortable with his from all indications. Nonetheless, once South Carolina and Jim Clyburn got the Biden bit in their teeth and that “was all she wrote” in the Democratic candidacy process.

Joe Biden was what he specialized in being, he was a compromise candidate. He was progressive enough (the Obama connection gave him that) and yet moderate enough (especially by comparison to the progressive wing of the Party) to look to be a good candidate to upend Trump. The fact that Trump was working the Biden-smear program in Ukraine and elsewhere so assiduously gave further evidence that he was a strong candidate against the Trump black box. We then all got onboard to support Biden, not just out of support for the man, but out of desperation to unseat Trump. Lots of chips were resting on Biden to do the job since the job was so important to get done.

Now we are where we are and all that has changed. Joe is still Joe, but the circumstances have become much, much worse in America. Trump and his blindly loyal, opportunistic or fearful Republican acolytes have made a mess of the country and, to a certain extent, the world. Trump was never the cause of great economic momentum as he claims. He was the cause of increased wealth disparity, most notably through tax policy. He was the cause of great divisiveness and racial rancor. He was the cause of the country and world regressing in addressing Climate Change. He was the cause of changes in foreign relations that were at very least very controversial and contrary to a 75-year history of strong alliances the country has valued. He was the cause of great concern by many in the destruction of norms and democratic process that he liked to call the “Deep State” and the rest of us think of as more the civility of democracy.

What I see happening now in the polls is the reflection that this country and the world are shit tired of the Trump nonsense. The fear that Joe Biden was too ordinary and unexceptional has taken a back seat to the feeling that it is time for the country to shake off all this drama and get back to the peaceful coexistence amongst ourselves and with the world that leads to greater prosperity and harmony. Everyone is tired and wants more trust and accountability and adult behavior in the White House. We are more than ready for a regular Joe at the helm.