Apr 11th 2021

Why Would Anyone Want to be President?

WASHINGTON, DC – More often than anyone might think, ample grounds exist for wondering why anyone would want to be president of the United States. Yes, there’s the glory of being elected to occupy the country’s most powerful office, hearing “Hail to the Chief,” receiving military salutes, and being called “Mr. President.” One presides over elegant state dinners. One never has to wait in line for a tee time. Still, time and again, we see presidential hair turn white (Joe Biden’s hair, of course, has already done so, but the strain of the office will turn up in some way).

The sources of that strain are clear: best laid plans go awry; unpleasant surprises lurk around every corner. At its start, Biden’s administration appeared to be a model of efficiency, especially compared to Donald Trump’s shambolic tenure. Even with a truncated transition – one result of Trump’s preposterous, and ruinous, insistence that he had won the election – Biden and his top aides seemed well prepared to govern. Biden’s heavily guarded inauguration – amidst tension lingering from the January 6 attack on the Capitol – went off smoothly. Only hours later he signed 17 Executive Orders and issued directives aimed at reversing signature Trump policies, for example halting construction of the border wall.

Biden’s first legislative as well as executive priority was to get a grip on the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s mishandling of the health crisis, some experts believe, caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die unnecessarily.

Biden’s opening acts, which included reversing Trump’s withdrawal from multinational organizations as well as implementing environmental and equal rights policies, went further than any other modern president in undoing his predecessor’s policies. An affable, accessible figure, Biden was proving himself tougher than most people had anticipated. He kept up his calls for bipartisanship, but if the Republicans didn’t intend to work with him, which there was reason to assume that they wouldn’t, Biden demonstrated that he was prepared to push on without them. 

The Trumpified Republicans, having become more partisan than ever, even oppose an expert proposal to beef up the clearly inadequate Capitol Police force. Some Trumpians insisted that the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, set off by Trump and ending in the death of five people, was no big deal.

By mid-February, the widespread consensus in Washington – among those not caught up in the Trump cult – was that Biden “hadn’t put a foot wrong.” But then his seemingly enchanted presidency was hit by a tsunami of challenges. Short of continuing Trump’s practices, there was little Biden could do to prevent word from spreading throughout Central America and Mexico that his administration would be more amenable toward immigrants. By early April, the number of border crossings had zoomed to the highest level in 15 years and included record numbers of teenagers and children without parents, overwhelming the government’s capacity for taking care of them.

Biden, in rare circumlocution and despite his sworn intention to run a transparent administration, affected that this wasn’t a crisis and wasn’t very different from what had happened every year at about this time. In another rare misstep, his administration has been secretive about conditions in some of the border refugee camps.

Immigration has proven an insoluble issue politically in the US for a long time, and Republicans leapt at the opportunity to embarrass Biden about it. His appointment of Vice President Kamala Harris to head the effort to reduce immigration numbers was a mixed honor. Harris’s assignment is the “root causes” approach – figure out why so many people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras want to leave their homes, or to send their children, on the highly dangerous trek northward. The root causes are believed to be corrupt governments, lousy economies, gang violence, and climate change – none of them conducive to a near-term fix.

The Biden administration also hadn’t anticipated the reappearance of yet another stubborn problem, the easy availability of guns. But two mass shootings within a week in late March in Atlanta and then Boulder, Colorado, forced the issue back onto the agenda. However, gun control is far more popular with the public than with the elected politicians in Washington, who still fear the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), despite it being embroiled in legal challenges.

What’s changed in recent years is the growing power of advocates of gun control. With each mass slaughter these advocates tell themselves that this time they have a real chance. They are saying that now. The most popular proposal is to expand background checks on gun buyers; thing is, the Boulder shooter had passed a background test. Biden has come out for, among other things, a renewal of an assault weapons ban, but he isn’t allowing this issue to get in the way of other priorities.

Biden’s highest priority now is his $2 trillion-plus infrastructure program. I think that Biden’s decision to “go big” on this as well as the preceding nearly $2 trillion pandemic rescue plan reflects in part a subterranean rivalry between Biden and Barack Obama: Obama was cautious, and Biden, once his loyal lieutenant, is deliberately being bold. Obama compromised with Republicans, who opposed the proposals, anyway.

Biden’s concept of infrastructure is generous, to say the least: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defines it as “the foundation that makes it possible for Americans to thrive.” The Biden program goes well beyond the old roads-and-bridges-and-water concept of infrastructure – in actuality a small portion of the plan – to include among other things climate change and in-home care for the elderly. A second part, covering schools and affordable housing, is to be proposed later. The humongous program and taxes to pay for it face opposition in both parties, but a parliamentary ruling that it can be passed in the Senate with 50 votes with Harris breaking the tie will help Biden enormously.

Some presidents indulge in the “Mount Rushmore syndrome” making an obvious effort to achieve greatness. Normally soft-spoken and apparently modest Biden is making his own bid for immortality.

 

Elizabeth Drew is a Washington-based journalist and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

© Project Syndicate 1995–2021

 


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More Current Affairs

Apr 13th 2022
EXTRACTS" "Ukraine and Russia produce a substantial amount of grain and other food for export. Ukraine alone produces a whopping 6% of all food calories traded in the international market. At least it used to, before it was invaded by the world’s largest nuclear power." ...... "When it comes to cereals like wheat, corn, rice and barley, the big players talk about millions of metric tonnes, or MMTs. A single MMT of wheat contains about 3.4 trillion food calories,." ....."Ukraine produced about 80 MMT of grain (a category that includes wheat, corn and barley) in 2021, and is expected to harvest less than half of that this year. A shortfall of 40 MMT is enough missing calories that a country like the UK could only make it up by having everyone stop eating for three years. That’s the thing about tonnes of grain: a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’ve got a real issue on your plate."
Apr 11th 2022
EXTRACT: "I don’t even know the little girl’s name. All I do know is what a friend of a friend wrote on Viber: that her relative, a senior nurse in one of Kyiv’s hospitals, “saw in the morgue a child with 20 varieties of sperm on her small body.” Since this information was conveyed in a private conversation, there is no reason to doubt its veracity."
Apr 8th 2022
EXTRACT: "Russian society has so far failed to stop Putin, just as German society failed to stop Hitler. And so, like a poisoned chalice, that task has fallen to the West, as it did in 1939. The West must now treat Putin and his regime the same way that Winston Churchill treated Hitler: Don’t talk to him, just defeat him. Dead-enders such as Putin are too fanatical and desperate to be reliable negotiating partners."
Apr 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail. There is a strong possibility that Putin has only a limited idea of how badly his army is faring. So be it – he’ll find out soon enough that there is now no path for him to military victory."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Policymakers expected that the country would be able to secure its energy supply entirely from renewable sources, so they resolved to phase out coal and nuclear energy simultaneously. The last three of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants are set to be shut down this year." ---- ".... the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7%. And while wind and solar generated 29% of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption." ----- "If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems – on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely – and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down....."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "For Putin, the past that matters most is the one the dissident author and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exalted: the time when the Slavic peoples were united within the Orthodox Christian kingdom of Kievan Rus’. Kyiv formed its heart, making Ukraine central to Putin’s pan-Slavic vision. ---- But, for Putin, the Ukraine war is about preserving Russia, not just expanding it. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently made clear, Russia’s leaders believe that their country is locked in a “life-and-death battle to exist on the world’s geopolitical map.” That worldview reflects Putin’s longstanding obsession with works of other Russian emigrant philosophers, such as Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev, who described a struggle for the Eurasian (Russian) soul against the Atlanticists (the West) who would destroy it. ---- Yet Putin and his neo-Eurasianists seem to believe that the key to victory is to create the kind of regime those anti-Bolshevik philosophers most detested: one run by the security forces. A police state would fulfill the vision of another of Putin’s heroes: the KGB chief turned Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe, is struggling to export last year’s harvest, and may be unable to produce much this year either. In addition, the war has caused a global fertiliser shortage, which will push up food prices around the world too. Coming at a time when the global pandemic had already increased food insecurity and depleted resources around the world, many countries may not be resilient to a major food crisis brought on by the war. Back-to-back global catastrophic events like this have not happened for close to 100 years." ----- "Another useful analogue is the case of Germany during the first world war. When war broke out in 1914, the German authorities had anticipated a short conflict – not too dissimilar to Russian assumptions a few weeks ago. Just like in Ukraine now, the first world war severely disrupted German farming."
Mar 31st 2022
EXTRACT: "The horrors of World War II – the death camps, slave labor, and inhumane experiments on people – produced a global commitment never to permit such crimes to be repeated. This began a transformation of international politics whereby appreciation of the value of every person’s life and dignity ensured that even most authoritarian governments at least paid lip service to human rights.  ----- But the Soviet Union and many of its successor states, particularly Russia, never internalized this change. More than three decades after the USSR collapsed, most post-Soviet countries are still governed according to the old “imperial” paradigm. So, it should come as no surprise that we are now witnessing a clash between fundamentally different sets of values and ultimate goals for statehood."
Mar 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Referencing past legacies as a justification for present-day political decisions is often effective – such appeals trigger emotional reflexes and contribute to thinking about politics in terms of rivalry and defence. The irony within the tragedy of the current situation is that Putin will assuredly go down in history as the figure that did more to unite the Ukrainian people (albeit against Russia) than any other in recent memory."
Mar 24th 2022
EXTRACT: " Despite the death and destruction that Russia rains down daily on them, the vast majority of Ukrainians are bullish about the future: 77% believe the country is moving in the right direction, 93% think they can beat back Russia, and 47% expect to win in the next few weeks.  Ukrainian policymakers are no less bullish, driving a hard bargain in negotiations with the Russians. Several factors account for this remarkable optimism."
Mar 21st 2022
EXTRACT: "As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, China’s role has been thrown into sharp relief. Prior to the war, some commentators suggested that China would openly side with Russia or seek to act as a mediator – so far Beijing appears to have resisted doing either. As Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the US, wrote recently in the Washington Post, Beijing has nothing to gain from this war, arguing “wielding the baton of sanctions at Chinese companies while seeking China’s support and cooperation simply won’t work”. Ambassador Qin also stressed that Beijing had no prior knowledge of the conflict,...."
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "The second source of Russian power is of course the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons would not deliver victory in a conventional war, but they could destroy a country in the blink of an eye. This brings us to a terrifying question: What will Putin do when he realizes that he cannot win his war in Ukraine by conventional means?"
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "An influential Shanghai-based academic commentator on international affairs, Hu Wei, recently advanced a cautionary argument that has been circulated widely in Chinese-language publications. In his commentary, which is unlikely to have been published without the approval of some of Xi’s senior courtiers, Hu wondered how Chinese communists would react if the war escalated beyond Ukraine, or if Russia was clearly defeated." ------- "For Hu, the answer for China’s leaders is simple. They should wash their hands of the relationship with Putin, ....."
Mar 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Meanwhile, Xi seems to have realized that Putin has gone rogue. On March 8, one day after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had insisted that the friendship between China and Russia remained “rock solid,” Xi called French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to say that he supported their peacemaking efforts."
Mar 7th 2022
EXTRACTS: "........Russia has been isolated by draconian Western sanctions that could devastate its economy for decades,...." ---- "Russia’s prospects are bleak, at best; without China, it has none at all. China holds the trump card in the ultimate survival of Putin’s Russia."
Mar 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Although Ukraine’s armed forces are outnumbered by those of Russian President Vladimir Putin invading our country, we take heart from the growing support we are receiving from friends abroad. Nobody should forget that this is not just an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine; it is an assault on the free world. ---- Putin has been at war with the free world for decades. "
Mar 2nd 2022
EXTRACT: "Moreover, with China sharing the Kremlin’s interest in containing the advance of liberal democracy around the world, Putin could count on the Chinese to provide an additional economic lifeline by purchasing Russian gas. But this new relationship will not be costless. As the world continues to divide into separate technological and economic blocs, Russia will become even more dependent on China, implying a loss of strategic autonomy. Russia may have a powerful military; but with a GDP similar to that of Spain and Italy, it is far from being an economic power."
Mar 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "The financial measures just announced against Russia are unprecedented for a country of its size. This of course means it’s impossible to predict exactly how their impacts will reverberate around the Russian – and global – economy. And we still need to see the exact details of the plan. But on their face they threaten the collapse of the Russian ruble, a run on Russian banks, hyperinflation, a sharp recession and high levels of unemployment in Russia, as well as turmoil in international financial markets."
Feb 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Putin apparently assumes that China will back him. But while he launched the invasion just weeks after concluding something akin to an alliance agreement with Xi in Beijing, Chinese officials’ reactions have been very distant with calls for “restraint.” Given Putin’s near-total reliance on China for support in challenging the US-led international order, lying to Xi would have no political or strategic advantage. That is what is so worrying: Putin no longer seems capable of the calculations that are supposed to guide a leader’s decision-making. Far from an equal partner, Russia is now on track to become a kind of Chinese vassal state."
Feb 25th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Russia’s ascent to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in numerous tragedies not only for the neighbors it subjugated and gradually absorbed, but also for its own people. China’s current leaders, in particular, should be mindful of this history, considering that imperial Russia seized more territory from China than from anyone else." ----- "Putin is taking Russia hurtling back toward the nineteenth century, in search of past greatness, whereas China is forging ahead to become the defining superpower of the twenty-first century. While China has achieved unprecedentedly rapid economic and technological modernization, Putin has been pouring Russia’s energy-export revenues into the military, once again cheating the Russian people out of their future."