Courtesy of Bastrop Advertiser
Dec. 31, 2020
By Bill McCann
Twelve years ago newly elected President Barack Obama called on his vice president, Joe Biden, to help clean up the mess left by his GOP predecessor George W. Bush. The mess included a severe economic recession, high unemployment, financial markets on the brink of collapse, and a $2 trillion Iraq war started by Bush under the false pretense that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The Obama/Biden administration pulled the country out of crisis despite ongoing opposition from Republicans bent on seeing Obama fail. Obama and Biden left office with a bustling economy, a recovered stock market, and a country in relative calm.
Now, after four years of Donald Trump’s failed GOP presidency, Biden again will be asked to repair a country in crisis when he is sworn in as president on Jan. 20. Given his experience as vice president and U.S. senator, he is the right person for the job. But it won’t be easy. Not only is the United States in a mess, but the federal government is in chaos and leaderless. The warnings shouted by mental-health experts, military leaders, and others four years ago about Trump’s unfitness for office turned out to be understatements.
Biden faces a continuing COVID-19 pandemic – and related economic consequences – that Trump bungled, then ignored. Those failures have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Biden will have to deal with a recent massive Russian cyberattack against federal agencies and corporations. Trump also has virtually ignored that attack.
Biden must patch up relations with our allies in the wake of Trump’s bullying tactics against them and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Biden will have to address racial tensions inflamed by Trump, his GOP enablers and cult followers.
He will have to re-energize demoralized federal civil servants – from Justice Department lawyers to health scientists to intelligence experts.
He will have to rekindle respect for science, make climate change a priority again, and undo the damage that Trump and his cronies have done to regulations designed to protect our air, water and land.
On the plus side, Biden has a proven record of getting things done. Unlike Trump, he will face problems, not flee from them. He is assembling a highly qualified, diverse leadership team capable of tackling problems head on.
As president, George Bush failed in part because he followed the usual Republican script of cutting taxes mostly for the wealthy and failing to monitor businesses that don’t always play fair. Trump failed because he is an incompetent, petty, corrupt, self-centered bully who mistakenly thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
Trump and the sycophants he placed in high government positions not only have harmed the government and nation, they also have been vindictive since Trump lost the Nov. 3 election by a wide margin. Instead of accommodating a smooth transition of power to the incoming administration, as past presidents have done, Trump and some appointees have impeded the transition, while GOP leaders sit silently. Biden’s transition operations manager Yohannes Abraham said last week the Pentagon was one of several “pockets of intransigence” hampering Biden’s team.
Trump has essentially stopped governing. Instead he has focused on fighting the election outcome by making baseless claims of voter fraud, mostly via Twitter tirades. One court after another, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has dismissed the claims.
Meanwhile, while threatening last week to veto a COVID-19 economic relief and government funding package, Trump added to his growing list of abuses of power. He pardoned four military contractors convicted of slaughtering Iraqi civilians. He also pardoned a number of convicted loyal backers, including former Republican congressmen, as well as Paul Manafort and others snared in the Robert Mueller Russia investigation.
Joe Biden’s presidency can’t come soon enough.
Bill McCann is a political columnist for the Bastrop Advertiser.
