Joe Biden: the perfect President for this moment

 

We have a real President again.

After four years of an overgrown child playing with our country and our lives as if they were toys, a grownup became the 46th President of the United States today. I disagree with Joe Biden about many things. Unlike a sizable number- perhaps a majority- of the former Republicans who found themselves unable to support Donald Trump, I find it impossible at present to simply become a Democrat. Conversations since the election reinforce my impression that both of our political parties are desperately sick, the Democrats being simply the healthier of the two. They have a long way to go to become the party of healing that President Biden and many of its members long to make it.

They are, for the most part, not only rightly scornful of the bitter, angry, unreal, and uncomprehending worldview that has governed the nation for the past four years but themselves unable to see the legitimate realities which animate at least some of the Trumpist hysteria. They seem unable to distinguish between civil discourse and "political correctness" as good manners and "political correctness" as coercion of those with whom its practitioners disagree. They self-righteously advance far-reaching and much-needed social reforms involving sensitive matters of personal belief and religious freedom with the touch of a butcher when a surgeon's hand is needed. They described the Bushes and McCain and Romney as if they each were Donald Trump, and still can't see that doing that deafened people to the alarm when the wolf finally came.

The problem with the Democrats is not that they are too liberal. The problem is that in the true meaning of the world, they are not nearly liberal enough. They have in many ways mirrored the shortcomings of the Trumpists whose antics they rightly deplore. I wish I could trust the Democrats as a party to fix what Donald Trump and the Republicans have broken, but I  can't.

But I do have confidence in Joe Biden. I believe him to be the peacemaker, the listener, and the healer America needs right now.  My prayers are with him- just as, despite my far-reaching disapproval, they were with his predecessor. As was the case with Donald Trump, I will not hesitate to call Joe Biden out when I think he's wrong, as well as to praise and support him when I believe him to be right.

I remain, like many Americans, a political orphan. I lack a party I can call home. Perhaps one will emerge in the next four years. Maybe a coalition of sane, responsible, generous-minded, and good-hearted folks on the center-right will form a new party to assume the role the Republicans have forever abdicated. Perhaps the Democratic Party will become a party whose "tent" is as big as its rhetoric insists that it is, and its takeover by the leftist equivalent of Trumpism can be forestalled.

Perhaps not. But I sincerely believe that Joe Biden is the man who needs to lead America in this hour and set it back on the path to sanity and greatness. And now is the hour for all of us to offer him our good wishes, our support, and our prayers as he tries to set our national house in order after the destructive, self-indulgent frat party of the Trump Administration.

Mr. President, you have my own prayers and good wishes. God bless you, and God bless your attempt to heal what the past four years have wounded and broken.