You might think that at least once in a political career stretching over half a century, Joe Biden would have made a political decision requiring courage. Certainly there must have been a time when he was willing to ignore the prevailing winds of opinion to protect a principle he holds dear, yes? He must have some core belief on which he will not bend, right?
Joe Biden (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Well, if that’s the case, it would be difficult to find evidence of it. Consider just Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Never before in his career had he deemed America systemically racist, a blood libel of the highest order, but even as he packaged himself as a moderate to a breathtakingly uncritical media, he was more than willing to do so during that summer from hell, condemning his country for rank political advantage when Black Lives Matter was demanding fealty to their cause. He was willing to do a total flip-flop on energy, repeatedly promising during Democratic primaries that he would end fracking, or fossil fuel production altogether, and then denying it and changing his position for the general election. He had for his entire career supported the Hyde Amendment banning the use of federal funds for abortion, then willingly threw it overboard so he could pretend to be a progressive.
He mocked President Donald Trump’s warnings about growing Chinese hegemony, saying in May of 2020, "China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man … I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us." But then he completely changed his tune one month later: “While Trump is attacking our friends, China is pressing its advantage all over the world. So you bet I'm worried about China.” The list of reversals and flip-flops goes on and on.
Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense for both Bush 43 and Barack Obama, once famously said that Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy issue over the last 40 years. Perhaps that is because, remarkably, he always landed on the position that required the least courage – and most benefited his political career … until it didn’t, and then he felt free to alter or discard his previous position. Hell, Biden was opposed to the raid that took out Osama bin Laden.
Even when he tries to appear courageous, as when he withdrew from Afghanistan, the result – and the weakness and gross incompetence it conveyed - was so disastrous that it likely influenced Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Biden acted as a politician without courage masquerading as the opposite; rest assured Mr. Putin was paying close attention.
Do we feel safe with a politician who has spent his entire career sticking his finger in the wind to determine his position? That is exactly what he did again in his State of the Union address. Not once or twice, but three times he repeated “fund the police,” even though he had stood by and tacitly supported progressives’ initiatives to defund the police. And then, in the ultimate exercise in gaslighting, he said we must “secure the border” – after trashing Trump’s border policies, inviting a massive spike in illegal immigration and creating arguably the most insecure border of any civilized nation. So, Biden had neither the courage nor minimum level of integrity required to own and defend what he had wrought. Instead, he did as he has done so often, flipping his stance in laughable fashion for the sake of political expediency.
Is this the type of man Americans can count on to make hard or urgent decisions in matters of war and peace, life and death?
For most career politicians like Biden, courage is most often mustered only when necessary, and to be avoided if at all possible. And after a shock win in his first run for the Senate, Biden coasted to victory in every subsequent senatorial election by double digits. He ran for president twice before 2020. He dropped out once for plagiarism and the second time after barely registering in the polls, but he was then rescued by Barack Obama, experiencing a revival due strictly to the good graces of a fellow politician. And after running a feckless campaign in 2020, he was all but handed the presidential nomination when a progressive party desperate to depict itself as moderate essentially ran off every one of Biden’s competitors to clear the field for the former vice president. And then, of course, the pandemic allowed him to hide in his basement, blame Trump for the death toll, and get Trump-deranged media to ignore the story of Hunter Biden, which likely would have sunk his campaign.
Point is, Joe Biden has long lived under a political lucky star. He has been handed much and never been seriously challenged. Thus he was never compelled to be courageous. Courage is not something to be mustered on demand. It more closely resembles a muscle that must be flexed in order to grow and remain strong. Now Joe Biden is the putative leader of the free world – and the burning question on the minds of most Americans in a world suddenly faced with war is whether he can answer the bell that will one day ring and muster the courage he has never before been required to demonstrate.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
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