Joe Biden Is A Genuine Hero
Yesterday I read an article in Newsweek describing Joe Biden as not a success, or a hero, but as a failure. The article says he stepped down because he had no choice, because Democrats had lost faith in him, and therefore he had failed, fallen by the wayside. His powers diminished, he couldn’t do the job anymore. Of course the man who wrote these sour grapes doesn’t like or give a damn about Joe Biden to begin with, because if he did, he’d see the man in a totally different light, and be honoring his successes.
Of course Joe is not as sharp as he was four years ago, and in the blinding light of national politics any slip of the mind can be deadly. I’m still convinced he would’ve done the job as president for four more years as well as any man ever has, but for the good of the party, and more for the country, he did the right thing by bowing out.
But this is not “failing.” Failing is when you haven’t achieved your goals and made the country a much better place to live in. He has done more good things for America than almost any President in modern history, passed a landmark infrastructure bill, solidified our stance with NATO, fought for lower drug prices, capped the price of insulin, beat down unemployment, added more jobs, and was on the brink of passing a bill to fix our immigrant problems on the southern border, a bill touted by Republicans, before the man who is the real failure in America’s landscape, Donald J. Trump, got his cronies to shut it down so that he could pretend Joe Biden had “failed.” You want to talk about real failure, talk about Donald Trump. The genuine failure in American politics is the embarrassingly vain, childish, self-inflated man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election, thereby preventing four more years of American deterioration, disasters, chaos at home and all over the world.
Which leads us to what makes Joe Biden an authentic hero for all time. When Joe saw Nazis with torches marching in Charlottesville, where a young girl was murdered, and Donald Trump said, “There were good people on both sides,” Joe said he knew he had to run for President and that it was now “a battle for the soul of the country.” He recognized the dark forces that Donald Trump represented, the ominous voice of authoritarians through history, the movement that was gaining ground to wipe out the democratic structures set up by our founding fathers. He knew Donald Trump was an existential threat to the country itself, and that Trump didn’t give a damn about truth, decency, justice, and especially his own people.
And Joe Biden began to speak out about this, began to campaign on this issue above all others. Because he knew if our democratic institutions were destroyed by a malignant madman, a self proclaimed god and dictator, America stands for nothing. Joe recognized maybe more than anyone, as a man who’d served his country for nearly fifty years, and had been through unbearable personal family tragedies, what the most important fight for us all would be. He saw it clearly for all of us, and took up the mantle of freedom, and began calling out those who would sell our democracy off to Russia, Saudi Arabia, or anyone else who might enrich the narcissistic megalomaniac who wanted above all to be king.
Over and over Joe spelled this out, and warned us that there were those who wanted to take control of the country, not to make it better or stronger, but to strangle freedom itself from it, to take away the very freedoms we’d fought for, that thousands of men since had died on beaches to hold onto and preserve. It was never hyperbole with Joe Biden, it was the truth, the most monumental truth. And in 2020 Joe Biden wrested the power back from the man who would do anything to hold onto it, who then told the Big Lie that he had won the election, who tried every slimy, underhanded stunt to steal the power back with threatening phone calls, false electors, phony court cases, and finally a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan 6th.
What followed the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the votes from the American people, and take over the country by force, verified the existential threat Joe Biden warned us about. Donald Trump proved to us all that Joe Biden couldn’t have been more right about the threat of losing our country to a sick autocrat. And what Joe did to stop Donald Trump from stealing the power from the people, makes him one of America’s greatest heroes. It makes him as great a hero as any other man who fought for his country, as great as any General, any statesman, any man who stood up and called out who our true enemies are. What Joe did in 2020, and since then, makes him that hero, and he didn’t need to step down to be that hero in the history books. But stepping down in 2024 simply validated every success he ever achieved. Father time is undefeated, but real heroes are heroes for all time, and that is Joe Biden.
Joe Biden never failed. Had he not stepped down, he might still have won, but by stepping down he boosted the country again, making us all aware again of the character that makes a true hero, and lifted us all up to make sacrifices for our country, continue the fight for the democracy he loves above all things, that he reminded us all of everyday: our truest treasure, our winning, democratic freedoms, for and by the people.
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective,” “Hidden Figures,” “Just Mercy,” and a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
