By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Former president Barack Obama, who must wake up every morning wondering what the hell happened, was quoted in the New York Times the other day on the subject of Joe Biden. According to Mr. Obama, our new president is now “finishing” what the Obama presidency started.
That charmingly self-regarding thought, aside from being dead wrong, gives Mr. Obama too much centrality in the centuries-long drama of American politics. Perhaps Mr. Biden sees himself as finishing what Lyndon Johnson started. Perhaps he sees himself as finishing what Franklin Roosevelt started. Perhaps he sees himself as not finishing anything, but rather as just another foot soldier in the classic American slog towards the future, shoulder to shoulder with Dwight Eisenhower, Dick Nixon, and Mary Tyler Moore. Perhaps he is just trying to do a day’s work.
I found Obama’s opinion to be interesting, though. It dovetailed nicely with a different piece of news that emerged earlier in the Biden administration, when word leaked out that Joe and his wife had never been invited to the White House for any private social event in the entire eight years of the Obama presidency.
I don’t get along with all of my co-workers, either. But I also don’t live in the White House, and I doubt that anyone in my office frets about missing spaghetti on Sunday night with my wife and my loquacious son, whose idea of conversation consists of reciting box scores, “translating” for our barking dog, and telling me what the temperature is in San Diego, where his grandfather lives (hint: it’s seventy-two degrees).
In other words, history is beginning to talk about Obama, it isn’t saying what he wants, so he is trying to nudge it along. He wants to be seen as transformational, but he didn’t transform anything. He wants to be seen as effective, but his main effect may well have been to attract hangers-on to those private White House dinners that were too good for Joe Biden. He advertised hope and change, and he made for a great-looking poster to plaster on your dorm room walls. But he changed nothing and the hope turned hollow. He was exactly what you get, in other words, when you start as a constitutional law professor and you serve one term in Congress, which you spend writing books, making speeches, and getting worshipped. I never expected much from him. Yet I was still disappointed.
Biden never sounds that smart. His campaign poster was instantly forgettable. And the jury is still out on what he can accomplish. But I am touched by how he never merited that White House invite, because he and I have that in common (I was never invited either). I am touched by how he soldiers on, like the old person he is, trying to get done what needs to get done without much interest in how he looks while he is doing it (I do that in my own kitchen). He was not my first choice for this office, and he picked quite a vice president for himself, pure politics, pure pandering, but so it goes in this world. At least he is competent and at least he has a heart.
He is also a throwback, for sure. And that’s probably why he and Obama never made friends; they came from different generations. That fact alone, however, stands for much more. Obama came of age as a modern gestural politician. Like Hillary Clinton, the woman he needed to beat before he could champion, he himself was the message: his clothes, his face, his voice. Wall Street could continue to make its money and big oil could continue to waste our future; the rich could get richer and the poor could get poorer; everything was fine because he himself was new, and he shared his spotlight with other new people. He was the sum total of the stories that had been written about him; he succeeded because of image-making, like the master of media who came before him, Ronald Reagan himself, and like the sick simulacrum of Reagan who came after him, Donald John Trump. Where the Venn diagrams of Trump and Obama overlap: they both floated above the realities of their time.
Biden grew up when reality couldn’t be ignored, in the old and fusty world that existed before Reagan declared government to be the enemy of the American people. He has therefore always known what a gross lie that was, and he does not feel like he needs to make apologies for making government do its work, which is the work of Americans helping each other. That his agenda seems so novel is ironic, then. He himself would surely tell you otherwise.
There is nothing new under the sun. Another good reason to cheer for the old guy.
Michael Davidow is a lawyer in Nashua. He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and his most recent one, The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
