THE FOLLY OF THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION IN POLITICAL LEADERS

To begin: the following is not an attack on President Biden. If you read it and conclude it is, I strongly urge you to reconsider that decision not to take that remedial course in reading comprehension.

For as far back as I can find anything on the topic in history, humans have had a remarkable tendency to take a leader and endow him (they’re always “him”) as the embodiment of all the values they hold to be important. When it comes to doing that with people like Domitian, or Ivan the Terrible, or Stalin, Mao and Hitler - or Trump - it leads people to do terrible things, having convinced themselves that the evil that is in that person is not Evil but rather Good.

When we do it with people like JFK, or Obama, or now Joe Biden - just to mention three I can list about whom I can plead guilty to having done this - it can also lead us to do things we might not do otherwise (fortunately in most cases not as horrific as what the previous paragraph alluded to). I don’t think I would have been such a supporter of the American Imperial Role in the world had I not been electrified at age 16 when Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.” I happily went off to the military and when we first heard we were going to Vietnam, I had two thoughts: first, we were Doing The Right Thing, Finally; and second, that when I got home I would be able to look my father the Kamikaze Survivor in the eye. It’s interesting to note that every other guy I know who went to that war around the same time - the “early days” - the sons of the “Greatest Generation” had the same thoughts in the same series. Almost every other Vietnam veteran I know, whatever their beliefs about the war to begin with, had that second thought. Guys always try to “live up” to Dad’s achievements and expectations. For me, it took having reality rubbed in my face when my best friend from boot camp told me his story of what really happened at Tonkin Gulf to change my position. And even then, I continued to hold Kennedy in a kind of reverence, even as all the stories of the womanizing and the poor decision making became known in later years. It took reading PDFs of previously Top Secret reports while researching my two books on the war to finally disabuse myself of believing the Kennedy Myth.

With Obama, I was certainly wrong on election night in 2008 to turn to a fellow worker in the campaign on hearing he’d won and say “We finally won the election of 1968.” Were politics not as they are in these times, I’d like to think I would have recognized his politics for the “Rockefeller moderate Republicansim” they actually were. I would probably still have voted for him, but I would have done so more clear-eyed, and without the later disappointment that came from the realization that he was not the liberal lion I had constructed in my mind.

See? That’s how it works. We do what we can to see the leader as the embodiment of the things we want. Kennedy as Arthur the King in Camelot, Obama as the redeemer who picked up the fallen sword and would wield it mightily in the fight for justice. Not that he was unjust; but he was a guy who took too long to realize the Political Reality he was dealing with, with the result that we lost that moment of redemption and have been digging our way out of the hole since.

Biden is a bit more complex. I never thought particularly well of him before 2020. I had no problem rejecting the possibility of supporting his presidential aspirations the first two times he ran, for the faults that became obvious; he certainly won no plaudits from me for how he ran the confirmation hearings on Clarence Thomas. I wasn’t impressed when Obama chose him as his Vice President in 2008, though I was later impressed by his leadership in the rescue program the administration developed. In 2016, I didn’t even think of him as a possibility. My first choice then was Sanders until I ran across too many of his supporters who were the reincarnation of the New Left morons I had left behind 45 years earlier. I voted for Hillary Clinton - despite having proudly not voted for her husband twice and being no “Clinton fan” at all - but I did so for the same reason I would have voted for whoever the Social Democratic Party candidate was in the German election of January 1933.

Come 2020, I was torn between Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. As Biden proceeded to “flame out” in the primaries, I thought to myself that he was proving my previous two rejections of him as a possible president were right. And then the South Carolina primary happened, and those that followed. I wasn’t so much “pro-Biden” as I was avowedly anti-Trump to the point of having read long-time friends out of my life over the previous five years. I breathed a big sigh of relief - as did everyone else - when he was called the winner on November 7, then held my breath through the two months of Trump’s attempted coup d’ etat.

And during the campaign, which I followed obsessively, I did come to change my opinion of Biden. I came to see him as “a man for his time,” said time being now.

In my study of history, one runs across people who become leaders, who are exactly what the time requires a leader to be and do. If one studies their history, there’s something all of them share: the qualities that made them “a man for their time” when they came to power were seen before that moment as the reasons not to support them. Allow me to demonstrate this in the lives of the two greatest American presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

Before he became president, Lincoln’s record was not promising. He had failed at many things he tried, including politics, but he had persevered after each failure, not allowing it to “knock him out.” That ability to take the punch, and experience failure, and yet continue on, was exactly what was needed in a president who would lead the nation through a civil war. Also, during those bitter years before, he had learned empathy, which led him to oppose slavery, and when he had the opportunity, to do all he could to end it. And those are the qualities for which he is judged great in history.

FDR’s history was equally unpromising, in different ways. He was largely seen in his early years as an upper class twit, who got whatever promotion he did from the accident of his birth rather than any inherent demonstrated ability. And then, out of the blue, with no warning at all, he was struck by polio. He was literally knocked on his ass. And then he found the inner wherewithal to recover from that body-blow, an event that felled most others if it happened to them, and to go on to become governor of New York. And then president. President of a country that had literally been knocked on its ass, from out of the blue, with no warning (at least none that most people could have seen), by a terrible blow - the Great Depression. The character quality he had gained in his battle with polio gave him the insight and understanding to lead a country that had been similarly struck. And then he did it again when Pearl Harbor was attacked, throwing the nation into the Second World War. The first year of that was nothing but bad news, and yet he persevered as he had before, and animated the country to do the same.

There are others who can be cited, but these two will suffice. What I came to see in Biden was that his experience of terrible loss coming out of the blue, completely unexpected, at the moment of his first significant victory - the loss of his first wife and daughter, right as he was elected to the Senate, and his discovery of the necessary inner resources to push through the loss and achieve success (when his first impulse had been to resign his office) - held the possibility he would know what to do with a country dealing with a pandemic and the threat of out-and-out fascism. So I voted for him with some enthusiasm - not Obama-level, but certainly not out of a sense of “I’ll vote for anybody who’s not that dangerous moron” as I had in 2016.

And with regard to domestic policy, I think I was right. In fact, he has done more and attempted to do more than I thought he would.

But...

The past two weeks have brought up the reasons I passed him over in 1988 and 2008 and was appalled by him in 1991.

Let me go back in my history a bit to explain this. I am what I call a “first wave male feminist.” By that, I mean my understanding of feminism comes from my experiences of the 1960s and 70s, which are now called “first wave” feminism, when the women founding the movement were figuring it out and people like me were learning things we’d never thought of before. I remember the first time I confronted the issue as though it was yesterday: the 1967 National Convention of SDS. Two women, Jane Adams and Marilyn Buck, presented a position paper on the role of women in the movement. It was cogent, well-reasoned, and as I heard them I found myself agreeing with most everything they were saying. It became progressively harder to hear them, though, due to the reaction of the majority of the men in the audience - all of whom would take no back seat to anyone in their support of racial equality and opposition to the war, and were in fact proud of the degree of their commitment. They were jumping up and down in their seats and shouting “I stand firmly erect in my support of pussy power!” I later heard a couple of them say that was their support for what was being said. I didn’t know at the time why I thought the women were right and the men were a complete embarrassment who made me want to crawl under my chair, but that was my response.

Let me now say that - as any man of my generation and times - I can think of far more than a few moments in the history of my relationships with women that I’d prefer not be made public. It’s taken a long time in therapy (with female therapists) to work out an understanding of my relationship with my mother (a relationship my brother and sister didn’t survive and I only narrowly survived), and how that has subconsciously affected my relationships. Take that and the “socialization” in the military of my first years on my own, and it’s amazing I am who I am.

I’m also who I am because of the women in my life, starting with the two grandmothers - both teachers - who taught me to read at age 4 using phonics, just at the time public education was about to throw that tried-and-true method away and begin the process of turning Americans into semi-literates. There was my wife, who pushed me to return to getting educated (sadly, that choice and a couple others we made eventually set us on what turned out to be separate paths). There was the woman I was involved with after who kept telling me (despite my unwillingness to hear at the moment) that what I was doing with my life wasn’t what I should be doing, and offering to go with me if I stopped doing it and became the writer she told me I should be. I did finally listen, too late for that relationship, but fortunately it turned into a long-term friendship. Then there was the partner I am with now who, at a low point in my writing career, suggested I look at the then-new internet and seek opportunity there - which turned out to create the life I have now that you all know.

When she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and I told her to have no worries that I would stay with her, she was initially surprised (people leaving in that kind of situation is far more common than most of us know, it not being something the leavers care to talk about afterwards). I told her I “owed her” - that doing what I am doing now was the only way I could repay the moral debt owed her for having given me what I have by pointing me in the right direction.

All of this is a very roundabout (think Rachel’s “explanations”) to getting to my point. I’ve paid attention to events in Afghanistan ever since I got hired back in 1986 to rewrite a screenplay adaptation of a novel about an American who takes Stinger missiles into the country to fight with the Mujahideen against the Soviets (yes, it never got made, which is why you don’t remember it - a common Hollywood tale). I don’t think there are 42 worse years of history that can be written about a country than Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979. But the thing I truly hated was the victory of the Taliban, and their imposition of 7th Century “Islamist” barbarism. (Let’s be real clear, Fundamentalist “Islamism” is as close to actual Islam as Fundamentalist Christianism is to actual Christianity or Fundamentalist Jewishism is to actual Judaism - in other words: Not. Even.) Most particularly, their torture of half the population by the imposition of “Sharia-ism” (which again has no connection to actual Sharia) on the women of Afghanistan.

I was enthusiastic about our invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, for what it would mean for women there. I was fine with the idea of “nation building” there if the liberation of women was a major part of it. It was obvious to anyone paying attention (in other words, not too many) by December 2001 when the Bushmorons let Osama Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora that they had no real commitment to helping Afghanistan and really had their eyes where they had always been: on Iraq. But the continuing opening of that society to women was The One Good Thing I would point to in discussions with anyone over the past 20 years about the “Afghanistan thing.”

And so the easy victory of the Taliban as the result of the moron stupidity of Donald Trump and the moron stupidity of the “furrin relashuns team” in the Biden Administration - and the certain knowledge of what those 7th century camel fuckers are going to do - and the complete unwillingness of a president who claimed “human rights” would be the centerpiece of his foreign policy to admit to his Gigantic Fuckup - leads me to see him in a different light.

Joe Biden is both The Guy I Wouldn’t Consider For President and The President I Am Glad Is In Office. His foreign policy choices reflect his now-49 year career of more misses than hits on the topic, as shown in the record. His domestic policy reflects a solid commitment to making the changes here at home we need to make - so long as he disabuses himself of this love of “bipartisanship uber alles” (if he doesn’t see that, he’s going to become a worse failure than Obama was for not seeing that).

In other words, he’s like all presidents: some things he does are great, some things he does are good, some things he does are wrong, and some things he does are dumber than shit - the better ones are the ones with more points in the first two categories than the second set. But saying they have to be all one or all the other misses reality - and has led us to our current political predicament.

So. I will support him where he deserves it and criticize him where he deserves it, and I will hope he will do what I have tried to do since that SDS meeting back 54 years ago: “When you learn better, do better.” He’d better do that, because the alternative in 2024 is too horrible to contemplate. We all need to do this, because doing less out of “defending our side” will ultimately not defend our side.

Peter Wehner, a conservative political observer who I respect despite frequent disagreements, has an excellent dissection of Biden’s foreign policy record in the current Atlantic, which you can read here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-record/619799/

And here is an excellent article - also in the Atlantic - on what is being lost in Afghanistan with regard to women:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/08/the-talibans-return-is-awful-for-women-in-afghanistan/619765/

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