Biden bids for another term

St. Patrick’s Day is the centre piece of the diplomatic year for Ireland’s embassy in Washington DC. That has been especially true since Bill Clinton became President in 1993. The White House began to host its own St. Patrick’s Day party which became the main event of the day drawing politicians and public figures of all hues from North and South of the border.

When I served with the embassy from 1987 through 1989 it was quieter but still busy. The Taoiseach or at least a senior minister hit town for a few days, as did John Hume, at that time the only regular political pilgrim from the North.

The presentation of the bowl of shamrock to the President and the Speaker’s Lunch in the Capitol were baked into the schedule. As the most junior member of the embassy team, my role in the former was to get the said bowl safely to the White House well ahead of the presentation itself and then scoot off.

I was too far down the pecking order to be allocated a place for the Speaker’s lunch. But I had an immensely kind and considerate boss who always tried to involve me as fully as possible. For the 1989 lunch, he suggested that I accompany him to the Capitol, hang around outside the room and see what happened. He knew that a lot of politicians would sign up to attend the lunch only to find something much more interesting to do when the time came.

And so it transpired. When it was clear that nobody else was coming and there were still empty seats, he pushed me into the vacant chair at an otherwise full table and I was in.

To be completely honest, I cannot remember if the recently elected President Bush attended or not. But I do remember other speeches. Senator Ted Kennedy delivered a seemingly relaxed, off-the-cuff tour de force combining humour, seriousness and wistful nostalgia. That might be expected of him given his family’s connections with Ireland and his finely tuned oratorical skills. But Speaker Jim Wright from Texas who had no Irish connections followed the Senator with a performance almost as good.

Next was our then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, who stood up, extracted papers from his pocket and proceeded to read the text with his customary dull magisterial solemnity. People listened respectfully, but his stiff formality stifled any possible emotional connection with his audience.

The second thing I remember from that lunch was the guest on my right-hand side — and I think this was why my boss pushed me into that chair. Senator Joe Biden was already well established as a leading figure in the Friends of Ireland organisation in Congress. He introduced himself at the outset and flattered me by spending the rest of the lunch until the speeches asking questions about the state of things in Ireland listening to my responses with politeness and attention as if they really mattered to him. Public figures who are happy enough in their own skin to stay in listening mode rather than spouting off themselves are rare indeed.

It has been said of Bill Clinton and even of George W Bush that they could look at you with a sympathetic intensity that makes you feel you are, for those moments, the sole object of their mental attention. Well, Joe Biden had that talent too and age has caused it only to fade gently rather than be lost altogether.

I was away from Ireland for the President’s recent visit but caught on the internet the set piece events in the Windsor Bar in Dundalk and in front of St. Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina.

The politicians introducing him at these events were always destined to be only the warmup act for the big star, their main job being not to hang around on stage too long. To be fair, neither Micheál Martin in Dundalk nor Leo Varadkar in Ballina failed that test.

But both spoke from visible scripts, delivering statements for the record rather than engaging directly and personally with either the President or the wider audience. They had a bit more warmth and levity than Charles Haughey displayed on the Hill 24 years ago. But they were still wooden with not even a pretence of spontaneity. They were saying words rather than talking to people. And their messages of benediction of the Good Friday Agreement and appreciation of US support in general and the President’s in particular were couched in well-worn clichés rather than language that normal people use in ordinary conversation.

As an aside, there is no partisanship in that observation. We have all seen Mary Lou McDonald and Pearse Doherty berating the Taoiseach or Tánaiste in the Dáil, protesting outrage at the latest government banana skin, eyes glued to the paper clutched in their hands. Their strict reliance on the lifeline of a script rather than at least appearing to speak from the heart blunts if not belies authenticity.

In Ireland, Joe Biden would have been cheered to the rafters anyway even if he just read out the local death notices. But his speeches were a lot better than that. As was to be expected, there was a lot of shamroguery and overlap in content between Dundalk and Ballina. But the delivery was authentic. The connection to his audience was real and tight. And the overall thrust of the content rang true.

As well as tickling the tummies of his Irish audience and paying appropriate tribute to the Finnegans of Louth and the Blewitts of Mayo, the President was rehearsing themes that I expect will loom large, explicitly or implicitly, in his campaign for re-election next year.

One was something small and specific. In both speeches, the President drew attention to the presence with him of his family. In Dundalk, for example:

I’m here with my sister, Valerie, and my youngest son, Hunter Biden. Stand up, guys. I’m proud of you.

The message to Republicans and especially their likely nominee to run against him, Donald Trump, was clear. “Come after Hunter Biden if you like but remember, if you do, I will be right back at you.”

More important was his exposition of the values that impel him.

Courage and loyalty were mentioned in passing. He dwelt awhile on dignity. For his dad who “worked like hell”, his favourite word was dignity.

“Everyone — everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity, Joey, and respect no matter what.”

A deliberate contrast with Mr. Trump who might possibly know how to spell dignity but shows no propensity to display or respect it. President Biden used dignity as a segue to the belief in the possibility of the future being a cut above the past.

all together we have to keep working toward a future that’s of greater dignity. And as we face darkness — and there is darkness we have to face — but we must keep marching forward because the world is a greater — it’s just — the world has such possibilities.

At some point during the 87 hours of engagement he has had as President with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jin Ping asked him:

“Can you define America for me?”

And I could say the same of Ireland. I said, “Yes I can.” I said, “In one word: possibilities.” We believe anything is possible. Anything is possible. Anything is possible if we set our mind to it. That’s who we are. That’s what we believe, in my view.

Everything that I write from here on is predicated on the presumption of continuing comparative stability in domestic and global affairs as they bear on US politics — and “presumption” is not a synonym for “prediction”. The effects of interest rate rises already in place and the possibility of more to come have yet to become fully apparent. China could seek to throttle Taiwan. Russia could take the upper hand in Ukraine — or vice versa. Abortion, Trump’s legal difficulties — who knows what might come out of left field? However, if the next 18 months follow the pattern of the previous 18 months, my hunch stands.

It is close enough to a racing certainty that the Presidential election in November 2024 will be a rerun of its predecessor. Mr. Trump will be the Republican nominee because every extra candidate that enters the race in silent opposition to him boosts his prospects of scooping enough primaries and associated delegates to be a comfortable winner. And President Biden will be the Democrat nominee simply because a clear run is normally an incumbent President’s prerogative. The largest risk factor to that prediction is the possibility of one of them dying. Mr. Trump is less than four years younger than the 80-years old President.

Subject to the very big “if” already stated, I would expect the President to win.

Since his surprise election to the Senate in 1972, Biden’s life has been characterised by deep personal tragedy and a pattern of his career oscillating in a zone between destiny and disappointment, his prospects and obvious qualifications for the highest office inching upwards before being set back by bad luck (somebody else stealing his place in the queue) and personal missteps before resurfacing only to retreat again.

The first of the setbacks occurred during my time in Washington when he had to withdraw from the campaign for the 1988 election for plagiarising other politicians in his own speeches. Even as recently as 2020, he might have struggled to win the nomination if party grandees had not persuaded the other Democratic candidates that a protracted struggle would benefit only President Trump and that Mr. Biden was best placed among them to defeat the incumbent.

He enjoyed a steady 7–8% advantage in opinion polls over President Trump throughout the year leading up to the 2020 election. But, whether to protect his apparent lead or simply because of COVID restrictions, he ran a cautious, low-profile campaign during which he still experienced some wobbly moments. His eventual popular vote margin was “only” 4.5%. But because of the crazy electoral college system, if 50,000–60,000 votes (out of over 155 million) had gone the other way, he would have lost.

But Mr. Biden has finally stumbled his way to the mountain top of having little left to prove. Re-election will be a bonus rather than a vindication. He is free of the burden of unfulfilled expectation.

Though his visit to Ireland was always going to be a “home town game”, he portrayed a confidence that was relaxed rather than aggressive but still in no danger of toppling over into complacency. His speeches were littered with the verbal knots and tangles for which he is famous, but he is beyond caring about such trivia.

His record in office is not perfect by any means. But it is decent, characterised by more than solid legislative achievement on the domestic front and nurturing the coalition in support of Ukraine on the international stage. It might more accurately be described as calm competence rather than stellar achievement. However, after the roller coaster years of the Trump administration, that should be enough.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, no longer offers the novelty he projected in 2016. Back then, he offered a vague possibility of shaking things up to reassemble them better. Now we know that when Mr. Trump shakes things up, the pieces end up all over the floor while he moves on to the next smash up.

Mr. Trump holds out the prospect of protecting the people from an allegedly already dire state of affairs becoming worse if he is not elected to prevent it. With unwitting but characteristic arrogance, he asserts that only he can save America. Mr. Biden holds out the fragile flame of possibility of a better future even if it one to be inched towards tentatively and awkwardly rather than attained in assured leaps and bounds. The election will surely be a litmus test between cautious optimism and aggressive pessimism about national direction.

Mr. Trump rarely smiles and never laughs except in sarcasm and derision. He is always simmering and seething, against lots of things in American society, enthusiastic about very little that is already actual. There was a time when Mr. Biden fretted over his future, but I doubt if he ever simmered often and he certainly doesn’t now.

In Ireland, President Biden’s smile was wide, bright and frequent. In the US, the candidate who appears most at ease with themselves and their country starts ahead of the gain line. The cheerful almost always have more friends and voters than the gloomy. The candidate who holds out the prospect of promoting a brighter future has the edge on the one claiming credentials to insulate people from a darker one. And that is how things should be.