Admittedly, a person might need to feel an exceptional degree of self-importance to launch a run for U.S. president in 1987, and then keep clinging to that dream for three whole decades before being elected. And yet, when I was casting my vote in 2020, I found myself hoping that our future president would serve for a year or two, attempt to use up whatever political clout he might possess in service of some important goal, then gracefully resign from office to let his vice president finish the term and build a political platform for herself.
“I’m probably electing Kamala Harris,” I told myself. “Even if his health holds out, he’s surely aware that stepping down would be the best way to achieve his goals for our country.”
After all, the president-elect had previously shown himself to be willing to play a supporting role in other people’s political glories. And it seemed obvious that this maneuver would be the best way for him to support his political party. The Republican members of congress and the senate would’ve frothed in anger and done everything within their power to stymie Kamala Harris … but that isn’t any different from how they’ve treated all of Joe Biden’s attempts to legislate.
Given that the Republican members of congress and the senate have already adopted a scorched earth policy – they even voted down their own immigration bill because passing it would’ve allowed Biden to claim that he’d accomplished something – there’s no way for them to express any additional anger or opprobrium.
The men in jail have told me about a similar phenomenon. Some people, they’ve said, are reflexively rude to every corrections officer. The COs are working for the state; the state has locked them up; an angry inmate snarls and snaps. Even at the well-meaning ones. Which is counterproductive, obviously – you don’t do yourself any favors by creating altercations with the people who have been given pretty absolute institutional power over your meals, your mail, your life. But also, when somebody behaves this way – when a person treats all guards with unmitigated hate – they sap themselves of their own power. Because there is nowhere left to go. If they really hated one guard in particular, how would they show it? They’re already treating every guard as though each one were the worst.
By establishing some baseline level of respect, I’ve been told, you can preserve your own access to power. Even in jail. Because you’ve created something that you could take away.
On the national scale, I assume that it was pretty clear to most people who have followed the news over the past decade that the Republican members of congress and the senate were going to reflexively oppose any agenda from any Democratic president. Even actions that they otherwise would have supported – like infrastructure spending, which was supposedly imminent throughout the 45th administration, or their own draconian immigration bill – would have to be squelched lest it seem like a Democratic president was getting things done, potentially benefiting our country.
So Joe Biden wasn’t any more likely to enact helpful policies than Kamala Harris would have been. He could have used his name, his many-decades’-worth of brand recognition, in order to get the pair of them elected, then simply resigned due to health concerns and let her govern.
Now Biden claims that the other political candidates have insufficient political records to win an election. Which is a problem that he caused, in a way; he had the chance to create a magnificent platform for the person whom he’d already indicated was the best choice to carry on his agenda if anything were to happen to him.
We’ve seen this same destructive hubris play out before, and recently. Ruth Ginsburg did a lot of good from her position on the Supreme Court. There was a good reason why she became a pop culture icon. And yet, in refusing to gracefully resign from the post when she was in her eighties, when she’d been told repeatedly by medical professionals that her health was giving out, she helped conjure the current supermajority of relatively young justices whose reactionary decisions have already undermined many of her accomplishments.
If you keep playing for “double or nothing” odds, eventually you’re going to end up with nothing.
And, look. Each of us is special. Our lives matter, and the roles that we have within our personal relationships couldn’t be filled by anyone else.
But within systems, we are replaceable. Without the work of James Watson and Francis Crick, the double-helix structure of DNA still would have been discovered, quite possibly within a few months of their announcement. Without the braggadocio of Elon Musk, humans will still be exploring the technologies needed to establish a colony on Mars, or elsewhere among the stars … and likely with fewer engineers having been subjected to infantilizing tirades along the way. Without RBG on the Supreme Court bench, progressive voices still would have been heard. More voices, actually: both the new justice’s voice and hers, had she chosen to step down.
Without Biden in the Oval Office for the past two years, that dwindling slice of the populace known as “undecided voters” could have seen how Harris leads, and would not now need to decide between potential senescence and portended chaos.
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header image photograph by Gage Skidmore.
Frank Brown Cloud 