Political Observer recalls Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan, as ‘The Transformational President’, while FDR remained in the shadow of that Hollywood has-been!

The reader needs, must consider what planet Janan Ganesh resides! This ‘essay’ on Joe is History Made To Measure ‘we can write it in exponent form as x^2’

The first paragraphs are indicative of the ‘Ganesh Historical Methodology’

There are three things that Joe Biden cannot shake off: his Secret Service guards, his own shadow and the phrase “ . . . since Lyndon Johnson”. He is described as the most consequential Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson. He is said to have brought about the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson. The historical comparison is meant well. In fact, it undersells him.

In turning ideas into statute, LBJ had lavish advantages. Democrats outnumbered Republicans around two-to-one in both houses of Congress for much of the 1960s. Having replaced the slain John F Kennedy, he began with the nation’s goodwill, and could present his reforms as his predecessor’s unfinished work. Biden had neither the numbers nor the moral head-start. Still, last week, the Ukraine aid package joined the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and a vast infrastructure splurge in Biden’s canon of important (or at least expensive) laws.

What are we to learn from this prolific doer of things? What, as we near its end, is the lesson of this startlingly fertile presidential term?

For those of us who who were adults at the time, Mr. Ganesh’s political portrait of LBJ, represents not just a failed attempt to make Joe Biden and LBJ, as somehow sharing the same political imperatives! Mr. Ganesh is not familiar with Billie Sol Estes nor Abe Fortas!

Joe Biden is a Neo-Liberal: not the etiolated remains of the New Deal: Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act (1965) were the belated, unfinished business of that hallowed New Frontier of Kennedy. While not forgetting LBJ’s ‘Guns And Butter’! nor the careers of the war mongers McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, or Robert S. McNamara. Kai Bird’s book is the kind of political education that Janan Ganesh has no interest in exploring:

Ganesh is a apologist/ propagandist for senile Old Joe, as the political savior against the Political Monster Donald Trump. Though he makes no appearance in this defence of Biden. Yet Biden in Ganesh’s telling is not an exemplar of what might be considered political virtues:

One thing above all: eloquence is overrated. So is charisma, vision-setting and all the other “performance” aspects of politics. Biden was an average-to-poor communicator even before his age-related deterioration. He has no signature speech or even epigram to show for half a century in frontline politics. What he does have is more inside experience of Washington — its details, its unwritten codes — than any president ever. The result is a one-term legacy that exceeds what such silver-tongues as Bill Clinton managed in two.

Here is Joe’s signature speech, that has eluded the grasp of Ganesh:

Joe Biden in 1993 Speech talks of “Predators” on our streets

The above paragraph doesn’t quite qualify as faint praise. The Reader might wonder what it is! Perhaps the strangled voice of a would-be novelist? Or a writer traying to meet his deadline!

The fact is that Ganesh trades upon ‘leadership’ invested in the very thing that he inveigh against!

Samples:

…

Biden understood, as his more outwardly gifted predecessors didn’t always, the importance of face. Something else, too: he can count.

A leader can’t be so presentationally inept as to be unelectable. But once that low standard is met, there are diminishing returns to star power.

…

Their nation-changing qualities — stamina, focus, certitude — were in the private side of politics, which is most of politics.

 Liberals need to hear this more than most. American ones in particular can be crashing snobs about education and speech. In The West Wing, they got to create their ideal president. The result? A hyper-articulate Yankee Brahmin.

…

But the ultimate beneficiary of this liberal obsession with rhetoric was Barack Obama. It wasn’t even profound rhetoric. “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

…

 Biden is to Obama what Johnson was to Kennedy.

… 

But the perception of what constitutes a leader never caught up. Because people overvalue what they themselves are good at, the educated politico-media class overvalues eloquence. 

I say all this as no particular admirer of Biden’s domestic bills. If he loses re-election, the culprit will be inflation, to which his spending has probably contributed. His protectionism almost guarantees immense waste and fragments the world trade order that allowed the postwar US to bind countries to it.

…

 Still, there are other moments to discuss how Biden uses his political skill. Just recognise that skill, and how little it relies on words. If a “great” leader is one who changes things, for better or not, this is an administration of mumbling, tongue-tied greatness.

Political Observer