Is This a Great Country or…What!?

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I have admired Joe Biden during his entire career in public service. He became a legend in Washington after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972 — a few weeks after his election to the U.S. Senate — and for nearly four decades thereafter, at the end of each day, he boarded a train and went home to Delaware to care for his two surviving sons. For 50 years, he has conducted himself with grace, intelligence and humor as senator, vice president and now president. As one of his opponents once said, “nobody doesn’t like Joe Biden.”

He has done an admirable job as president, repairing much of the damage done to the federal government by the Mad King Donald, and wringing a few pieces of significant  legislation from a dysfunctional Congress. But here’s the problem.

At the end of almost every speech he gives, he delivers a Reaganesque, “shining-city-on-a-hill” peroration in which he expresses his deeply felt vision of America as a country that can do anything, subdue any foe, achieve any goal, meet any challenge. It is at this point that I and a great many Americans wonder, what the hell is he smoking?

The America of his vision is the America that won World War II, helped the nations of the world get back on their feet, built the Interstate highway system, stood up to the Soviet Union, presided over two decades of national prosperity and peace, and went to the moon. It was a great time to be an American. But it all started to fall apart in 1969.

With three of our best and brightest leaders cut down by assassins, with riots consuming our cities, then with a long and bloody entanglement in a pointless war in Vietnam, we descended. In t 1980, the Reaganauts declared the responsibility for all our troubles lay with the government itself. Government isn’t the solution, they said over and over again, government is the problem. 

So they began to deregulate everything, turning previously public enterprises over to the oligarchs for their personal profit. This trend has continued to this day. They deregulated the electric utilities, with the result that our aging, faltering grid is on the verge of failure for lack of maintenance. They deregulated the railroads, so that while Europeans and Asians are whisked about their countries on bullet trains, we chuff along on the equivalent of steam locomotives. They deregulated the airlines, so today we deal with chaos in the skies and airports that look like survivors of a nuclear winter. (To see a shining, modern, relatively new airport you have to go to Europe or Asia.) They deregulated broadcasting, bequeathing to us Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. 

The America that lingers in Joe Biden’s heart is long gone. The America we live in is better described by Jeff Daniels’ famous 2012 oration in the first episode of his TV series The Newsroom, “America is not the greatest country in the world anymore:  

“We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”

The achievements of Joe Biden as president, while notable as measures that try to deal with some of our most urgent problems, also serve as stark reminders of how little has been done for so long while those problems became intractable. The anemic measures to combat climate change in the most recent legislation, for example, are three decades late and are the moral equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a life-threatening tumor.

As much as I like and admire Joe Biden, I cannot help but wonder how successful his presidency can possibly be, when all is said and done, given that his vision of America is a delusion. 

[To watch the Jeff Daniels speech, click here.]