“Perhaps no moment from the first Democratic debates in June was more dramatic than the tense exchange between former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris of California,” Matt Stevens wrote in The New York Times. “The two Democrats sparred on the issues of race, segregation and school busing.”
Biden named Harris his running mate anyway.
Donald Trump, whose job Biden wants, opted for oleaginous obsequence in his VP pick. He tapped Mike Pence, who “gives ass-kissers a bad name,” according to iconoclastic journalist Charles Pierce.
“Historically, presidents who have been strong and effective have always kept around themselves what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls a ‘team of rivals,’” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.
Goodwin wrote a critically-acclaimed book about President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet which she titled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The often cantankerous group “represented very different spectrums of political opinion from very conservative to moderate, to radical,” she told NPR. “And as long as he could keep that coalition together by keeping these people inside the tent, he was actually keeping those strands in the country together as well.”
Team of Rivals vs Team of Toadies
Lincoln was the first Republican president; Donald Trump is the 19th. Trump loves to liken himself to the Great Emancipator. Few, if any presidential comparisons, are more unapt.
Lincoln was self-deprecating. Trump, the narcissist-in-chief, blusters to mask his cringing insecurity.
Lincoln knew his rambunctious rivals made him a better president. Deviate even slightly from the MAGA line in Trump World, and you’ll get fired, demoted or tweet-trashed.
If Goodwin or some other scholar decides to write a book about the Trump White House, Team of Toadies would make a great title. So would Profiles in Cowardice.
Forget Lincoln. Look at Jeff Davis instead.
Clardy said a more apt comparison is one between Trump and Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s first and only president.
“The most obvious parallel is that they’re both racists, although Davis owned slaves, and Trump obviously doesn’t,” said Clardy, adding that Davis, too, “was thin-skinned and demanded constant adulation and constant validation.”
Presidents like Trump who require abject servility from their vice presidents, advisors and cabinet secretaries “naturally choke off any alternative policy options coming up that might help a president succeed,” Clardy said.
Okay, Clardy’s a devout Democrat. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2016. He’s a delegate to this year’s mostly virtual convention, to boot.
But most historians agree that strong presidents surround themselves with strong-willed subordinates from vice presidents down — rivals, if need be — unafraid to speak truth to power.
Weak ones like Trump go for fawners and flatterers.
Consider Lincoln and Stanton
Can you imagine Trump hiring for his cabinet a guy who didn’t vote for him, and in fact made no bones about his utter contempt for him?
Stanton was a Democrat who didn’t cast his ballot for the president in 1860. He lambasted Lincoln as the “original gorilla.” After Lincoln was elected, Stanton railed against the “imbecility” of the new administration.
But with the war going badly and the War Department in disarray in 1862, Lincoln named Stanton his second secretary of war. Stanton whipped the department into shape “and became one of Lincoln’s most effective cabinet members,” Clardy said.
Stanton, one of the best-ever secretaries of war, rushed to the hotel room where Lincoln lay dying from John Wilkes Booth’s gunshot. When the president’s life ebbed away, Stanton, sobbing, famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Biden starts building his Team of Rivals
Clardy thinks Harris is a good choice for Biden’s running mate. The debate dustup, he said, “showed she has spunk, and she has drive. I also think that exchange made Biden a better candidate in the end.
“She’ll be a great asset to Joe Biden both as a candidate and as president should they win in November. But I expect to see a lot of very smart, intelligent men and women of every stripe and hue being a part of this campaign and being a part of a Biden administration.”
In contrast, Clardy expects “history won’t look kindly on Donald Trump.” Or his Team of Toadies.
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