Joe Biden's Patience Is His Biggest Strength And Weakness. By Brian Beutler

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Joe Biden's Patience Is His Biggest Strength And Weakness

His willingness to indulge bad-faith actors sometimes wears them down, but sometimes lets them get the best of him

Joe Biden shakes hands with Greg Abbott after Abbott handed him a letter outlining the problems on the southern border upon arrival at El Paso International Airport in El Paso, Texas, on January 8, 2023. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

When the going has gotten tough in Joe Biden’s presidency, he’s shown remarkable equanimity, and placed all his faith in the idea that quiet, thankless diligence will pay off in the long run. 

The evidence is impressive, but also mixed. He managed to enact more legislation in his first two years, including large, bipartisan bills, than most of his critics and allies thought possible. Unlike Donald Trump, he doesn’t routinely upend his approach to challenges or crises to manipulate headlines. He’s patient when confronted with obstacles to his agenda, but sometimes to a fault. He’s responded to Republican hostage-taking not by refusing to pay ransoms but by trying to minimize them. 

When this approach has overcome obstruction (as when Republicans reluctantly increased the debt limit) he’s taken a victory lap for passing yet-more bipartisan legislation and praised his cynical negotiating partners. When it has hit a snag he’s eschewed unilateral action in favor of trying to grind the obstructors down. 

This is the tack he’s settled on in the hope of resolving his two biggest extant political headaches: 

His stewardship of the U.S.-Israel alliance as Benjamin Netanyahu indiscriminately bombs Gaza;

A volatile constitutional standoff at the border with Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX).

In the case of Israel, he’s ignored activist pleas for him to call publicly for a ceasefire, in favor of a diplomatic approach that may actually yield a ceasefire and secure the release of hostages. At the border, he’s kept his cool as Abbott has usurped his authority, in the hope that a stalled border-security bill in Congress will force the standoff to an end. 

Perhaps he’ll be vindicated in these efforts, but I can’t help but wonder whether stoicism and magnanimity are working against him, placing fate in the hands of two bad actors. 

Netanyahu and Abbott are similar kinds of civic degenerates, but their low character isn’t as widely understood as it ought to be in the U.S. mainstream. And it’s worth pondering how easily either man might’ve ensnared Biden in these no-win situations if he and other liberal leaders had done more from the outset to distinguish reasonable people from discredited people when he took office after the Trump insurrection.

For years before the Trump presidency, Netanyahu had played sides in U.S. politics. In 2015, he accepted an invitation from Speaker John Boehner to trash Barack Obama before Congress, aligning with Republican efforts to scuttle U.S. nuclear-nonproliferation diplomacy with Iran. Through that period and beyond, his right-hand man in the U.S. was Ambassador Ron Dermer a Republican operative. 

Then, starting in 2017, Netanyahu did a bunch of undisguised colluding with Donald Trump. As a refresher, Netanyahu:

Denied visas at Trump’s urging to Democratic members of Congress;   

Welcomed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to give a highly partisan speech to the Republican National Convention (which Trump staged at the White House!) from Jerusalem;

Dedicated the “Trump Heights,” a settlement in Golan, during the run-up to the 2020 election;

Waited long enough for everyone to notice before calling Biden to congratulate him on winning the election, without actually saying he’d won the election.

That was all before he tried to subvert Israel’s democratic system to keep himself out of prison and launched an aimless, indiscriminate bombing campaign also to keep himself out of prison.

Biden had an opportunity early in his presidency to put everyone who indulged Trump-era corruption on notice that they would not be trusted partners in his administration. It would have clarified things—it also would’ve primed the U.S. public to expect Biden would feel no obligation to let Netanyahu lead him around by the nose.

Greg Abbott is a Republican officeholder here in the U.S., so it makes much more sense for his relationship with Biden to be antagonistic and partisan. But Abbott isn’t content with normal partisan give-and-take over policy. He’s been a blight on the country and his state in many ways, but his most discrediting decision was to support a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

That lawsuit was MAGA at its most egregious, yet his stunt along the southern border has received credulous treatment in the press— not just because it threatens a real, important constitutional crisis, but because he’s managed to avoid association in the national discourse with the most unsavory aspects of Trumpism. I think Biden’s approach to politics has helped Abbott have it both ways.   

I can’t claim to know how things would’ve played out differently if Biden engaged in more j’accuse, and less “our friends on the other side,” but at least there’d be greater consensus within the country’s non-MAGA majority that counterparties like Netanyahu and Abbott are dirty. Perhaps not quite as cynical as Trump himself, but little different than pretenders like Kari Lake or Elise Stefanik. And that may have given him more room to maneuver. 

Refer a friend

And the insult to injury here is that over-indexing on the slow boring of hard boards and under-indexing on partisan conflict has allowed sourness to fester in his coalition. Patience and diligence are admirable qualities but they aren’t satisfying or cathartic at all, and have stripped his presidency of the more poetic aspects of politics. The long fight over the Inflation Reduction Act ultimately yielded significant progress in the fight against climate change, but embittered many of his allies in Congress. His administration appears to be on the cusp of negotiating a lengthy ceasefire in Gaza, but even if it comes together, it may not repurchase the good will he lost among those who’d pleaded with him to call for a ceasefire publicly. 

I really do hate to be in the position of advocating for less forbearance and more satisfying-but-ineffectual posturing. But this is an election year. Biden is currently losing. At some point people need to know who’s on which side.