Perspective: The louder Donald Trump complains about Joe Biden, the quieter Biden should be
Jeffrey A. Engel is director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and co-author of"Crises come and go in American history. Only three threatened our republic’s very existence. The union might have been stillborn in 1787. It attempted suicide in the 1860s. It seemed near death in the 1930s when economic chaos ruptured faith in democracy itself.Leadership faltered at the onset of each of these dire watersheds, unwilling or unable to meet the moment.
Into the breach stepped George Washington. The former Continental Army commander was not his era’s brightest politician or best orator, nor even its most savvy military strategist. But he was experienced, and trusted.Reluctant to abandon his long-desired retirement for what he feared would mean further public service during his last useful days, Washington nonetheless agreed to attend the convention forming in Philadelphia with hopes of constructing a new national government.
“I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety,” Lincoln consequently explained as Inauguration Day neared, but to keep things from getting worse. Southern guns targeted the Union’s Fort Sumter, but had not yet fired. Opportunity remained to keep the national powder keg from exploding.“Very few men have the faculty to say nothing, and fewer to speak at all under circumstances like those which surround Mr. Lincoln,” a New York newspaper praised.
First, of course, he had an election to win, and silence proved just as effective a political tool for Roosevelt as it had for Lincoln and Washington before him.to stem the crisis and lack of empathy toward its hapless victims appeared to Democratic strategists the best argument for replacing him.
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