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Joe Biden Wants You to Just Calm the Heck Down
His success consistently comes from turning down the temperature
Remember, back in the Obama days, this old meme?
I feel like I saw this meme every week during the Obama presidency. There would always be some fire raging, whether it was the emergence of the tea party, or economic collapse, or WikiLeaks, or birtherism, or the 2012 election, and liberals like me would run around freaking out that it was all going to fall apart. This was the response that would make you feel better: Obama’s got this. He’s smarter than the bad guys, he has a plan for this, he knows what he’s doing. Everyone chill the fuck out.
It’s remarkable, after the four years we’ve just been through, that we were so panicked during Obama’s years in office. The worst dumpster fire of the Obama era wouldn’t make the top 100 on the Trump Chart of Atrocities. Every worst-case scenario we imagined during Obama’s presidency came true during Trump’s. And, it turned out, there were many, many worst-cases that we hadn’t considered. There were so many reasons to panic.
A large part of Joe Biden’s pitch for his candidacy — from his sober tone, to his outreach, to his reliance on experienced veterans of previous Democratic administrations — was that a vote for him was a vote for a return to the relative normality of the Obama era. But Biden’s insistence that everyone needs to calm down is perhaps his most Obama-like quality, and one oddly unremarked upon. But this is how he won. And this is precisely what his inauguration was all about.
Remember, back when Biden was in the crowded field of Democratic candidates, he was the one—when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other top-tier contenders were (totally understandably) being firebrands about the nightmare of the Trump presidency and pushing dramatic, radical change to combat him—who stayed calm. He talked noticeably less during debates and vigorously obeyed the rules — he routinely noted that his speaking time was up as other candidates just went on and on — and he often sat back as everyone else punched themselves out…
