Five Great Things Biden Has Already Done
'Were learning not to underestimate the guy.
By David Brooks
Many of our best presidents have been underestimated. Truman was seen as the tool of a corrupt political machine. Eisenhower was supposedly a bumbling middlebrow. Grant was thought a taciturn simpleton. Even F.D.R. was once considered a lightweight feather duster.
Ive been reading Joe Bidens speeches and Im beginning to think even his supporters are underestimating him.
Hes walking across treacherous cultural ground, confronting conflicts that are shredding the nation, and hes mastering them with ease.
Biden is campaigning in a country that has lost faith in itself. Sixty-six percent of Americans believe our nation is in decline, according to a study from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Hes also running in the middle of a political and cultural civil war. Eighty-two percent of Biden voters believe that Donald Trump would like to gradually transform our country into a dictatorship, according to that I.A.S.C. study. Ninety percent of Trump voters believe that the Democrats want to gradually turn America into a socialist country. According to a survey conducted by Braver Angels, a group that sponsors bipartisan conversations, 70 percent of Americans believe that if the wrong candidate wins, America will not recover.
Biden is campaigning in a land filled with fear, hatred and apocalyptic thinking. It would be so easy for him to reflect that fear and hate back to voters. Thats what Trump does.
But Biden is not doing that. Never in my life have I seen a candidate so confidently avoid wedge issues. Biden is instead running on the conviction that, despite it all, Americans deeply love their country, and viscerally long for its unity. Hes running with the knowledge that when you ask America about the greatest threats to our future, political polarization and divisiveness comes out No. 1.
Its easy to say youre for healing division. But heres what Biden has actually done:
Hes de-ideologized this election. Hes made the campaign mostly about dealing with Covid-19. . .
Hes separated politics from the culture war. . .
Biden has scrambled the upscale/downscale dynamic. . .
Biden has avoided the stupid binaries about race. . .
Hes done a good job reaching out to white evangelicals. . .
70 percent also say the most important job after the election is to heal our enmity, to do the hard job of working with people whose views we find completely objectionable. This unity impulse is powerful in the populace, but it is deeply hidden.
Joe Biden knew it was there.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opinion/joe-biden.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage