Joe Biden is almost certain to be sworn into office in January as the nation’s 46th president. He has built vote leads in battleground states, and these appear to be insuperable despite President Trump’s declared intention to mount legal challenges to them.
Opposed teams of attorneys will therefore fight in court, but this should not distract the apparent winner from focusing on the immense challenge of fulfilling his campaign promise to unite the country. It is a vital task that Biden should make his highest priority if he wishes history to recognize him favorably. He seems to know this, over the weekend saying, “With the campaign over, it’s time to … come together as a nation,” a theme he emphasized again in his well-turned victory speech in Delaware on Saturday night.
It is incontrovertible that Trump was divisive. It is not difficult to acknowledge this despite the fact that the Washington Examiner, along with more than 70 million voters, thought on balance that he should be reelected to a second term. We did so, as we suspect most did, because we approved of his policies, for example, on taxes, deregulation, energy, and the Middle East — certainly not for his demeanor and intemperate rhetoric.
But division, by definition, takes two sides, and Trump’s four years in office were characterized by grotesque and deliberate divisiveness from the Left, including but not limited to a concocted allegation by his political enemies that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and continued to be a stooge of Moscow thereafter. This and many other calumnies show that the need for tolerance and restored unity is at least as much on the Left as on the Right.
Biden needs to understand that, but for Trump’s unpresidential demeanor and his handling of the coronavirus, the incumbent might now be celebrating victory as a reward for his economic policies in particular, with real job creation and record low unemployment. It was, in other words, not Trump’s policies, but Trump himself, who was repudiated.
Voters dispensed with him but increased Republican numbers in the House of Representatives, put the GOP within one Georgia runoff of maintaining control of the Senate, and added to conservative control of state legislators in advance of the census and redistricting. There was no blue wave. Biden had no coattails in victory, whereas Trump had coattails even in defeat.
To unite the country, Biden needs to build his administration as a reflection of the vote, which is to say as a dignified and centrist government. He will fail if he brings members of the hard Left, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his acolytes, into the Cabinet. Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniters, not dividers, into his administration.
If, as expected, Republicans continue to control the Senate, the Democrats’ constitutional vandalism will be off the table; there will be no packing of the Supreme Court or Senate, and the Electoral College will not be demolished. But these saving constitutional graces must be matched in policy. Voters said that they don’t want left-wing extremes, and the new president must act on that democratic instruction.
Personnel is policy. Therefore, the composition of Biden’s Cabinet will be crucial and a clear signal of whether the 46th president means what he says or is a hypocrite parroting bromides. He has only one shot at doing this, for he must be regarded as a one-term president; is it plausible that the country would elect a chief executive to start a second term at the age of 82?
So, it is already crunch time for Biden. He can do what he has said, which is also what voters have asked him to do, or he can capitulate to the Left by installing proto-socialists, breaking his faith with the public, and dooming his presidency to failure.
He should now put country over party, unity over ideology, and govern from the middle, which is where most Americans live. This is a moral obligation, which the next president promised as the “word of a Biden,” the homespun aegis of his most somber undertakings. When one runs for president as a Biden, every promise is the word of a Biden. He has promised healing and unity. Now it is time to deliver.
The Biden the public should be able to expect as president is the one who negotiated the constructive deal with congressional Republicans to extend a list of expiring tax cuts in 2010. He’s the one who was on the verge of finishing a deficit-reduction deal with Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor until President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner pulled the plug due to a separate impasse of their own.
It is that Joe Biden, the one who claimed to stand for “regular order” and mutual respect, who sold himself to the public. Even that Joe Biden always was clearly a left-liberal, but he made a commitment to be a traditional leader within the American tradition, not a radical determined to revolutionize American life. Unless Biden is a weak-willed placeholder for the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, he will stand against that wing when it pushes him to radicalize his presidency.
