Is Divided Government a Stroke of Good Luck For Biden?

I see that the editors of the Wall Street Journal were struck by the same passage in Joe Biden’s victory speech that I was:

Joe Biden sent an encouraging message Saturday night in declaring “a time to heal” as he claimed victory in the race for the White House. Toppling an incumbent President is no small achievement, and congratulations are in order assuming his votes in the Electoral College hold.

“Let’s give each other a chance” and “put away the harsh rhetoric,” Mr. Biden said. “Stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They’re Americans.” After a campaign in which he called the incumbent a racist and blamed him for every Covid-19 death, we’ll give the former Vice President the benefit of the doubt that he means what he says now. And hold him to it.

They go on to make a good point:

So much, by the way, for Mr. Trump’s “authoritarian” takeover. His opponents have spent four years warning that he is a would-be Hitler who would stage an American Reichstag fire (Yale professor Timothy Snyder) or slowly extinguish political freedom (pick a progressive pundit). The 25th Amendment was invoked as a way to remove Mr. Trump from office.

These elites lost faith in American democracy and its institutions when they panicked after Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. The left and some conservatives spent four years refusing to accept his election as legitimate, and Democrats deployed the FBI in 2016 to subvert his candidacy and then undermine his ability to govern. It was the dirtiest trick in American presidential history. These elites only trust democracy when they dominate it.

If, once all of the dust of the lawsuits has settled and it is determined he was defeated in his re-election bid, should be leave the White House peaceably at the end of his term, quite a few people will owe him an apology which I presume will not be forthcoming.

Here is their peroration:

Mr. Biden will enter the White House after one of the most unusual elections in history. He didn’t change his party as most successful candidates do. Democrats instead elevated Mr. Biden as their last-chance moderate to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primaries and then run a character campaign against Mr. Trump. It proved a smart bet. Rep. James Clyburn, who rallied the moderate black vote behind Mr. Biden in South Carolina, saved the party from a left-wing nominee who would have lost.

Credit Mr. Biden for running a disciplined campaign focused on being the anti-Trump who would crush Covid and unify the country. There’s no reason from the campaign to think he will do any better than Mr. Trump on Covid, except sound more serious. But his message fit the mood of a worried public tired of constant political warfare. His strategy of barely venturing in public, and barely answering questions, limited his potential for mistakes. And the media, united in trying to defeat the President they loathe, gave Mr. Biden a pass.

Mr. Biden’s narrow campaign message—Covid, character and pre-existing conditions on health care—leaves him with a governing dilemma. He has a mandate to end the pandemic and heal partisan divisions. But with the Democratic defeats down ballot, he lacks a mandate for the policies he promised his party’s left. Mr. Trump had more coattails than he did.

In the fine print of the Sanders-Biden unity document, you will find the most radical progressive agenda in decades. But few in the media other than these columns examined it in any depth. Mr. Biden rarely mentioned it. The Americans who voted for him mainly to defeat Mr. Trump do not want a radical economic, political or cultural agenda.

I think the problem is considerably more serious than that. Rarely in U. S. history have the two political parties been so distinct, so discrete, and too many of its members run unopposed other than in the primaries by members of their own party. That leaves neither experience in compromise or a basis for reaching one.

I hope they are correct in their conclusions:

Our sense is that, left to his own instincts, Mr. Biden is not an ideologue like Barack Obama. He is a pragmatic man of the center-left who can work across the aisle. But he will soon be 78 years old, and his vigor is clearly on the wane. He will have to battle younger progressives, inside and outside his Administration, who will be frustrated by the divided government Americans voted for and will want him to cede power sooner rather than later to Kamala Harris.

I don’t think that Barack Obama was as much an ideologue or that Joe Biden as much a pragmatist as they seem to believe. My interpretation of both individuals is quite different. We’ll see. Fingers crossed that Joe Biden lives through his four year term in sufficiently good health not to be replaced.