The aftermath of Joe Biden’s poor debate, coupled with Democratic hand-wringing and the prolonged bad mood the country seems to be in, opens the door for fresh thinking and bold new ideas. The specific argument of the moment is whether Biden should stay the course or give up his reelection campaign. As football coach and commentator John Madden used to say, “Every situation changes the situation.” So here’s a novel proposal from some buddies and me who have been going back and forth on the question.
As background, you need to know we are the remnants of a Peace Corps group that spent two years in central India in the late 1960s building schools, raising chickens and killing rats. Back in that more Jurassic period of the Peace Corps, we were “Kennedy Kids,” inspired by President Kennedy’s upbeat vision to put some of the talents, privileges and compassionate outlooks he assumed we had acquired in our college years back into the world and on the ground.
He wasn’t wrong, though everyone who joins a program like that always has multiple reasons for doing so, most of them personal. Still for some people, national service early in life, whatever the type and no matter if it’s the Teacher Corps, Marine Corps or Peace Corps, tends to light candles that still burn later in life.
Like others, I and my old buddies — Hollis McMilan in Oregon, Dick Harris in Texas, John Bayne in Florida and Ted Riley in Washington — have been exchanging texts and emails trying to evaluate the precarious moment we now seem to be at.
Taking a long view and wanting to interrupt the country’s endless capacity for polarization, how about if Joe Biden — with true gratitude for what he has accomplished — resigns, turns the presidency over to Kamala Harris, and she then engineers Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger in as vice president, along with the promise of enticing a few other moderate Republicans into a couple of Cabinet slots.
We need national leaders who can set inspired examples and work across the ideological fault lines that keep hard-line Democrats and Republicans towel-snapping, eye-poking, face-slapping, nose-grabbing, ear-pulling and back-stabbing. Writing about the shrewd political savvy of President Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called such a thing a “team of rivals.”
A coalition White House could be one step toward less-divisive rhetoric, more constructive dialogue between left and right, and the actual possibility of getting things done that improve everyone’s life. But I’m also a realist. Party politics in America, and in Hawaii especially, exerts huge gravitational pulls and there is always that thin dotted line between a vision and a hallucination. Still, life is full of possibilities.
At the end of the day, I and my Peace Corps buds were, and still are, pragmatists. We want to get a few constructive things done and not let the ideal “perfect” solution defeat that which is perfectly “good.”
In his farewell address in September 1796, George Washington warned about the potentially “baneful” and deleterious effects of political parties. If his ghost wandered around today, I think he would also want to change the game.
Peter S. Adler, Ph.D., is a Hawaii-based mediator and organizational consultant.
