Joe’s the President
As I write this the 2020 Presidential Election has not yet been called for anyone, but right now the current vote coupled with where votes are still being counted suggests that Joe Biden has won an Electoral College victory that’s somewhere between adequate and comfortable. Given the way the vote counting is going, by the time anyone other than me reads this the race will likely have been projected as a Biden win, notwithstanding the sore-loser litigation Donald Trump has been promising.
Despite the victory that’s staring Democrats in the face, if you took your cues solely from the Democrats I know, both in real life and on social media, you would think that Joe Biden had lost in a disastrous fashion. Rather than being ecstatic, or even merely content to have drastically improved the quality of the person serving as President of these United States of America, the Democrats I know and encounter are despondent over the election outcome.
Now, I understand that my fellow Democrats are disappointed because we were all wanting something more than a simple win. Democrats wanted a landslide of sufficient magnitude to repudiate both Donald Trump and Trumpism. We wanted an outcome large enough to shout that America is better than what we’ve gotten the past four years. We wanted to win once and for all so that we could stop worrying about politics so damn much — as if that is a thing that can happen in a democracy.
I confess that I wanted that sort of outcome, too. I still think that it’s imperative for both America and the world that this current incarnation of the Republican Party go the way of the Whigs and disappear from American politics. Yet I am perfectly content — pleased, even — by the win that Joe Biden was able to score this year. I think that every Democrat, as well as the unaffiliated voters and even Republicans who supported Biden over Trump this year, should share my pleasure with the win, even if we had hoped it would be bigger.
I’m pleased even with a middling result from 2020 because I remember the 2000 election. I remember that even winning the most votes doesn’t always mean winning the election. I remember what came after George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001. I remember that George W. Bush, his supporters, and all the institutions of government carried on like he’d won the presidency even though he lost the popular vote. I remember how quickly the news media stopped even mentioning that Bush likely didn’t even “win” the Electoral College in the boring sense that involved counting all of the legitimate ballots with dimpled chads in Florida.
Most of all, I remember all those damn “W The President” stickers that started popping up on vehicles around my neighborhood in 2001. I remember that, true to the message of those annoying stickers, George W. Bush was, indeed, the President.
The power of the office of President is greater than any moral power that can be found in the relative margins of an election. Narrow wins are still wins. All of the powers of the Presidency come with the inauguration. They aren’t rationed out based on the popular vote margin or the Electoral College difference.
In the early 2000s my family lived in a wealthy suburb chock full of Republicans. Functions at my daughters’ elementary school meant hanging out with a bunch of Republican parents who were ecstatic with the result of 2000 election. Those Republican parents at my daughters’ school understood a lesson that I’ve learned for 2020 and 202. Being the President is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either are or you aren’t.
Joe Biden will be on the winning side of that all-or-nothing proposition, while Donald Trump will be on the losing side of it, and that’s all that matters in the end. Yes, it would have been cathartic to see Trump and Trumpism swept from office with the force of a tsunami, but the powers of the Presidency don’t expand or contract based on the size of the electoral victory. Either Joe is going to be the President or he’s not, and the great news is that he’s going to be.
In the days after the Supreme Court’s intervention in 2000 wise pundits and prognosticators opined that Bush’s shaky ascent to the Presidency meant that he would have to scale back his governing ambitions. He lacked a mandate, they said, so he would have extend olive branches and reach across the aisle and make peace.
That’s what the pundits and prognosticators said, but Bush and his supporters knew better. Despite his paltry vote count in 2000 and the bare majority he later claimed in 2004, George W. Bush governed like a man with a mandate to the bitter and desperate end. W never stopped pursuing an expansive approach to his presidency. He shrugged off catastrophes like invading Iraq and moved on to try to keep creating his own reality. Thankfully, the 2006 midterms clipped his wings by putting Democrats in control of Congress.
Those damn “W The President” bumper stickers were emblematic of a non-sentimental approach to Presidential power that George W. Bush and his supporter’s took. Frankly, it’s an approach that’s admirable and worthy of emulating for Democrats in 2020 and beyond: there’s no point in worrying about the margin of the last election once you’ve already won the power to govern. Any time spent fretting about electoral legitimacy just wastes the precious time you have in office.
I used to think that my Republican neighbors festooned those little stickers onto their SUVs just to rub salt into the wounds of Democrats like me while we were waiting in a line of cars to pick up our kids after school, but over the years I’ve changed my thinking about them. Now that the wounds of 2000 have grown a bit of scar tissue, I realize that those stickers weren’t intended to pick on Democrats at all. After all, there were precious few Democrats in the posh suburb where we lived, so the school parking lot wasn’t exactly a target rich environment for trolling. There just weren’t enough Democrats to rankle with the stickers if their intent was to anger us. No, I now realize that the intent of those stickers was to buck-up the confidence of the Republicans themselves.
Devoted Republicans stuck those “W The President” stickers on rear windows and bumpers to reassure themselves and their co-partisans that their guy had, indeed, become President. After the nightmare of debauchery and liberalism that they perceived the Clinton years to have been (my, how times have changed!), what they perceived to be the natural order of things had been miraculously restored by George W. Bush. Against all odds a Republican was once again in the White House.
Even though I didn’t agree with their assessment, I know that those silly stickers celebrating what turned out to be a god-awful President reassured them that, whatever else was going wrong in their lives, America’s leadership was in good hands (again, in their Republican minds circa the early 2000s). The stickers reminded ordinary Republicans that, while Democrats like me could insist that W had only won the White House because Republican appointees on the Supreme Court changed the rules of the election after the fact, those Democratic objections weren’t going to be enough to dislodge W from the Oval Office. Moreover, the stickers reminded them that George W. Bush was, in fact, “The President,” with all the attendant powers and authorities bestowed on that office by the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America. There was no need to try and squeeze an explanation of the improbable course of events that made Bush President onto the bumper sticker. He was the President, and that’s all that mattered.
The memories of those “W The President” stickers inspire me today as I contemplate Biden’s solid but non-landslide win. Yes, I wanted Joe Biden to win with a popular vote margin reminiscent of FDR’s defeat of Hoover in 1932. Certainly, if ever there was an incumbent President deserving of humiliation at the ballot box it was Trump, and the knock-on effects of such a blowout would have been good for our republic. I can live without getting what I wanted, though, because we got what America needs, which is Biden elected President and Trump defeated.
Come noon on January 20th, Joe Biden is the President. Joe will be charged with faithfully executing the laws of the United States. Joe will be Commander-in-Chief of all the U.S.’s military might. Joe will be the one with the nuclear codes. Joe will be in charge of administering the vast executive branch of the federal government. Joe will be setting foreign policy. Joe will be leading the federal response to COVID-19. Joe will be appointing judges. God help us until then, but come Inauguration Day Joe is the President.
Will Joe face obstacles? Of course. I particularly worry about the obstruction of Senate Republicans, but as bad as that obstruction will be for an America desperate for solutions — and it will be bad — it’s worse to wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether Trump has sold us all out to North Korea or Vladimir Putin.
Was Joe my first choice in the primary? Not even close. Joe was closer to my seventh choice than my first in the Democratic primary field, but the choice in the general election was easy and clear for me.
Is Joe a savior for America? Can he unify this divided nation and heal our self-inflicted wounds? Not a chance, but at least he won’t intentionally harm our body politic. At least Joe won’t try to tear us apart from the President’s bully pulpit just because he believes it suits his political purposes.
Joe Biden isn’t going to be everything we want, but we can rest assured knowing that he is going to be what we need. Joe’s going to be the President. We may have to remind ourselves of this fact over and over again, but that’s okay. Put it on a bumper sticker, write it on a post-it note, put it on your coffee cup for 2021.
As of January 20th, Joe’s the President.
