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A Tribute to President Biden, Whom Historians Likely Won't Give Credit for a Remarkable Performance [1]

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Date: 2023-10-21  

I hope historians give Biden credit for an impressive performance in this Israeli/Hamas confrontation.

But I expect they won’t.

I think Biden has achieved a leadership tour de force around this crisis. But however impressive his effort, it seems there’s a good chance that this crisis will unfold in ways that are painful for us to behold.

That tour de force of Biden’s has been a multi-dimensional engagement with the crisis:

Biden’s initial engagement with the traumatized people of Israel gained him the standing with Israel to have some influence. Biden made an exceptionally open-hearted connection with the suffering and frightened people of another nation. We hear that people wept upon hearing Biden’s words. Billboards went up in Tel Aviv thanking this President of the United States.

And then he used that standing deftly, exerting an influence in the right direction. He conveyed that the danger is that rage will lead to an over-reaction – Biden mentioned mistakes the United States made in over-reaction to 9/11. And Biden spoke directly to that point: “Don’t be consumed by your rage.”

Biden slowed things down, counseling the Israelis to think about the consequences, to ask “What’s next?”, to plan with the long-term in mind.

He made himself an advocate also for the Palestinians, working visibly and hard to get humanitarian aid to them, speaking again of the two-state solution, and of the rights of Palestinians to self-determination.

And he wielded a big stick by sending a naval task force to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Open-hearted and empathetic, wise, tough.

I’ve never seen any leader show so many dimensions of their humanity in a world crisis in one complex diplomatic composition. Biden’s composition has been powerful -- a work of art one might say -- like nothing I can recall witnessing in the realm of world leadership.

Profound public theater. An outstanding composition.

(Churchill’s wartime leadership and eloquent speeches in Britain in the early years of World War II is the closest I can recall to something that hit so many different notes.)

But however impressive his performance, there seems a good chance that no one will feel that things are going well. Even if the Israelis take the right course – and who know what that right course is? Not I! -- so many are the ways that things can go wrong, that it seems that even the right decisions might lead to disturbing outcomes, such as

A disturbing number of Palestinian civilians dying in Gaza;

Likewise the number of Israeli soldiers will die, if there’s street-by-street fighting in a super-densely populated area (with hundreds of miles of tunnels dug underneath);

Many deaths also among the hostages;

A major intensification of hatreds across the region;

The expansion of the conflict into a larger regional war, with nations confronting nations.

All real possibilities. And all likely to lead people to conclude that things were managed badly.

(People don’t celebrate when a leader prevents things from being even worse. What people know is how what happens makes them feel. If people don’t like the outcome, they will likely fault the President. Just as Presidents get credit for good times even when they didn’t bring them about.)

Even if Biden’s interventions significantly prevented this crisis from unfolding in even worse ways, if things unfold in troubling ways, it seems likely the historians of the future would not celebrate Biden’s performance.

So, imagining that historians – seeing whatever ugly developments may transpire as evidence that President Biden did badly -- might not notice how impressive, and even effective, Biden was in this crisis.

Biden seems often to accomplish much but not get credit for his accomplishments. Thinking that that pattern is likely to repeat itself in this situation, and that this performance is perhaps his most remarkable yet, I want to pay tribute to this surprisingly capable American leader.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/21/2200777/-A-Tribute-to-President-Biden-Whom-Historians-Likely-Won-t-Give-Credit-for-a-Remarkable-Performance?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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