Election 2020: Mandate To Do What? By Al Sikes

Congratulations to the next President of the United States, Joe Biden. His resilience and persistence is a powerful lesson and especially to all who measure their time by Internet rhythms.

Unfortunately for President-Elect Biden there is no mandate this time around. Biden used Donald Trump’s egregious shortcomings to define the future. The one thing Joe Biden repeated over and over again with many combinations of words is that “I will not be Trump”.

Otherwise, our next President, early in the foreplay of the campaign worked to get close to Bernie Sanders followers and then the opposite. In July Vox reported:  “A “unity” task force created by Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a detailed set of policy recommendations for an incoming Biden administration”.  Yet during late summer and fall when asked about the pact with Sanders, Biden would bristle and state with feeling, “I am running as Joe Biden”.

The overarching theme that helped define his anti-Trump rhetoric was one of unity—a worthy but exceedingly complex goal. Unity is, well, rather elusive. It quickly becomes unity to do what and with whom? Is it the unity of the Party caucus or something more ambitious?

Unity inevitably requires a leader to step away from his most passionate ideologues. They are not interested in being locked up in a room negotiating a new health care program with the leaders of the other Party. The Democratic caucus fell into line in 2010. It passed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); without a Republican vote. A small legislative and judicial rebellion followed; one still being fought today.

Biden’s hairbreadth victory and the likelihood that Republicans will control the US Senate preclude a revolutionary health care law being passed. I suspect there is a majority in the Senate for more universal coverage and to cover pre-existing conditions. But, getting there will require hard work, understated rhetoric and if it isn’t done in the first year of the new President’s term, it won’t get done.

As a practical matter, unity ends up being a chunk of what you want. Ronald Reagan always said he was happy with “80%” of what he wanted. In his first term President Reagan was able to work “across the aisle”. 

The Biden presidency will begin in 2021. He last held office in January 2017. Things have changed. The overriding lessons from the pandemic signal an even more compelling need for universal health care and a need to begin the long road to right America’s fiscal affairs.

In the food chain of business, when value is added a percent of the ultimate price goes to the value creator. As younger generations drive America’s prosperity, a percentage of every dollar of new tax revenue must be allocated to reduce the debt they will have to shoulder.

And, there will be a temptation to rejoin the nuclear accord with Iran as it existed when President Obama left the White House. Resist, and if a new accord remains on your wish list, negotiate a treaty that must be ratified by the Senate.

The rhetorical path to unity is really the President’s main job. At best, under prevailing circumstances, a President is a storyteller—a narrator explaining in understandable terms what needs to be accomplished—persuading the majority to follow his lead. 

In my lifetime, the best narrator was Ronald Reagan. He began with “Morning in America”, skills of persuasion and a sunny disposition. His opponents had a hard time convincing the public that he was trying to destroy all that was right and good. 

Joe Biden’s challenge will be to fuse the concrete with the ethereal. 

Few in Washington possess the talent to effectively implement big ideas. Presidents have their hands full sustaining the narrative and reminding senior staff what they are in place to accomplish. The President, any President, needs a good conductor—an implementer. 

Picture if you will an orchestra as it awaits its leader—the conductor. Each player will be warming up their instruments. It will be cacophonous—not easy on the ears. And then the conductor strolls to the podium, glows in the audience’s reception and then turns back to the orchestra to bring several dozen players into harmony as they give life to the composer’s brilliance.

In my political experience, the conductor who met the challenge was James Baker who became President Reagan’s first chief-of-staff. He had run two campaigns against Ronald Reagan. The first he won for Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican convention and the second he lost as he helped his close friend George HW Bush compete for the Republican nomination in 1980.

History reports that Baker was one of one. Winning Presidents don’t choose the other candidate’s campaign manager to be their chief-of-staff, do they?

Washington is an unbelievably tough and complex town. Biden had best choose his lead staffer carefully so that he can comfortably be the narrator. If the President-elect’s operational leader is up to this complex task, the President-Elect can pursue unity for real.

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Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris will soon be First. She will be heralded in article after article for being the first woman, first African-American, first Indian American—the qualifiers and descriptors will go on and on. Perhaps we should simply recognize her for being a very accomplished leader—such a pivot will represent America’s strength—out of many one.

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President Trump is asking his supporters to donate to a fund to challenge the election outcome. If you are tempted to donate only do so if Trump will match you dollar for dollar out of his own funds. 

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al recently published Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.