Character Matters

Character Matters

The next four years will set the course for much of what follows for this nation’s near-term future for the next 10-20 years. This is what makes the 2020 presidential and congressional elections so consequential. If John McCain or Mitt Romney were the Republican candidate, the presidential race could be largely played out at the level of policy where the differences between Democrats and Republicans are sharp enough. That is because core matters of character formation and fundamental capacity to govern would not need to be addressed.

This is obviously not the case with the current president, with the result that the Trump administration is fundamentally averse to putting the national interest at the core of its value system. This is in no small measure, due to Trump’s incapacity to place his own perceived self-interest in any broader frame of reference than his own stilted self. Such a characteristic is tragic in an individual. In a national leader, it is catastrophic, particularly in a world power as consequential as the United States.

Joe Biden is far from perfect—no one is. Even so, Biden does have the virtue of acknowledging his imperfections, even the likelihood that he might get things wrong and, then, taking corrective action. Such self-awareness is invaluable in a leader of any institution. In the president of the United States, it is a virtue of the first order. Whatever flaws there may be in Biden, he exudes a basic integrity, humility, and appreciation for the fundamental worth of others. It is these attributes that would enable him to convey, from the wellsprings of his own lived experience, authentic empathy to the suffering of millions that this nation sorely needs. In this respect, VP Biden has the potential to mirror FDR in his desire to uplift the nation amid great adversity and conflict. This has something to do to his own innate ability, but even more, in his capacity to interpret the temper of the times in which we are living and rise to the occasion.

Given the current reality of who is now in the White House, a Biden presidency offers the prospect of fundamentally resetting the table of what it means to have a chief executive that citizens in this nation, as well as world leaders, can fundamentally trust, even with disagreements over specific policy directives. In light of Atlantic Magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent essay, “Trump: Americans who Died in War are “Losers” and “Suckers,” the differences between Biden and Trump, at the level of character and personal morality, alone, could not be sharper. When one factors in capacity for governance, intellectual depth, and sound policy in face of the broad range of domestic and international challenges this nation will face in the next two decades, the obvious choice for which candidate demonstrates the capacity to lead becomes only further clarified.

It is evident, that at this time, Trump is only favored by a minority of potential voters for a second term. If the consistency of polls is any indication of where things stand with the presidential race, it seems clear that the only way Trump can win is through cheating by voter suppression, derailing the viability of mail-in voting, and drawing on the explicit support of Russian president, Vladimir Putin. I have little doubt that Trump will play every card—legal and illegal, ethical and unethical—to win, even though if he does so by pernicious means, he will do incalculable damage to the moral and political fiber of this nation. 

In denying that John McCain was a hero because he refused to cooperate with the North Vietnam government in accepting favored treatment from his comrades in order to be released from captivity before them, Trump’s singular response was, “I like people that weren’t captured.” Beyond the category mistake of associating heroism with a winner/loser status, is simply the perversity of this view.

 In Trump’s ethical system, it seems that being a “loser” is the worst thing one can become. Because of his fear of becoming one, he is willing to inflict inestimable damage on this nation’s body politic, as reflected in much of his governance, and, especially now, if that is what he thinks it takes to get himself reelected. Whatever forms of socio-pathology are operating within the president’s broken soul that propels him toward the Orwellian dystopia of fundamentally damaging this nation, it flies in the face of what we need in a president in the next four years. 

 In the words of the great, recently deceased, congressman, from Baltimore, Elijah Cummings, “we are better than this.” Much better, in fact. Let us rise to the occasion to what these times demand of the citizenry of the United States of America in order not only to preserve, but to expand on the better angels of this nation’s destiny, as exhibited, at their best, in Washington, Jefferson, the great African American abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights activist icon, and truly humble, Rep. John Lewis (may you rest in peace).

 In the presidential election of 2020, the soul of the nation rides in the balance. 

2020