Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Former Vice President Joe Biden at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, March 10, 2020, where he spoke to members of the press
As Joe Biden settles into his role as presumptive nominee, his public persona is beginning to resemble that of Dwight Eisenhower, official grandpa for the presumably somnolent 1950s. And not just because both were masters of garbled syntax.
Throughout Eisenhower’s tenure, the newish specter of nuclear holocaust at the apex of the Cold War hung over America. I was a grade-schooler during the second half of that decade, and distinctly remember the regular duck-under-your-desk drills that were supposed to help me and my little peers survive a nuclear attack. During this time, Eisenhower was a kind of calming presence, in more ways than one. Not only did he come off as a non-belligerent general, to offset the brinkmanship with which his administration regularly confronted the Soviet Union, but he also disparaged any effort to undo the main legacies of the New Deal: Social Security, unions, and progressive taxation. Beneath this don’t-rock-the-boat status quo, however, a civil rights rebellion began to brew, which, not surprisingly, Ike was slow to notice and compelled to act only when violence (such as the white resistance to the integration of Little Rock schools) impended.
Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war, substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.
Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ). Eisenhower the Second may win the White House, but provides no guide to governance.
