Acceptance is the final stage of grief.***

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Editorial

Nov 9, 2020, 1:55 PM

Joe Biden sent an encouraging message Saturday night in declaring “a time to heal” as he claimed victory in the race for the White House. Toppling an incumbent President is no small achievement, and congratulations are in order assuming his votes in the Electoral College hold.

“Let’s give each other a chance” and “put away the harsh rhetoric,” Mr. Biden said. “Stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They’re Americans.” After a campaign in which he called the incumbent a racist and blamed him for every Covid-19 death, we’ll give the former Vice President the benefit of the doubt that he means what he says now. And hold him to it.

Mr. Trump hasn’t conceded and claims to have won the election if only legal votes are counted. But he’ll have to overturn Mr. Biden’s leads in some combination of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, and that’s a very long shot. The deadlines for vote counting and official validation are fixed in law and inexorable. Mr. Trump isn’t obliged to concede or congratulate his opponent if he loses, though it would be better for the country and his own legacy if he did.

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So much, by the way, for Mr. Trump’s “authoritarian” takeover. His opponents have spent four years warning that he is a would-be Hitler who would stage an American Reichstag fire (Yale professor Timothy Snyder) or slowly extinguish political freedom (pick a progressive pundit). The 25th Amendment was invoked as a way to remove Mr. Trump from office.

These elites lost faith in American democracy and its institutions when they panicked after Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. The left and some conservatives spent four years refusing to accept his election as legitimate, and Democrats deployed the FBI in 2016 to subvert his candidacy and then undermine his ability to govern. It was the dirtiest trick in American presidential history. These elites only trust democracy when they dominate it.

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The American public has behaved more rationally and exhibited its will through the ballot box. The largest voter turnout in decades shows their democratic engagement. Voters gave Democrats the House in 2018 to check Mr. Trump, and now the party has captured the White House. This year Democrats might have won the Senate, and not lost seats in the House, if they hadn’t frightened the country with their threats to pack the Supreme Court and break the legislative filibuster.

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Democrats didn’t win this election so much as Mr. Trump lost it. The President has many achievements, not least his tax reform and deregulation that gave the long but weak Obama economic expansion a second wind. Yet Mr. Trump always made himself, rather than his ideas, the center of all political attention. Democrats were happy to oblige and used his persona and chaotic governance against him.

No one outworks Mr. Trump as a campaigner. And his admirable focus on middle-class Americans who were long ignored and disdained by coastal elites explains the passion of his supporters.

But he ran for re-election in scattershot fashion, with no consistent message. He never took apart Mr. Biden’s policies, and his performance in the first debate reminded many why they disliked him. His inconsistent, sometimes dismissive handling of Covid-19 also cost him.

Republicans elevated Mr. Trump as an outsider who would disrupt the Washington political class, and in many ways he did. But in the end he lacked the political skill to persuade a majority that his disruption was worth the cost of political divisions and the risks of a second term. Character does count in a President.

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Mr. Biden will enter the White House after one of the most unusual elections in history. He didn’t change his party as most successful candidates do. Democrats instead elevated Mr. Biden as their last-chance moderate to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primaries and then run a character campaign against Mr. Trump. It proved a smart bet. Rep. James Clyburn, who rallied the moderate black vote behind Mr. Biden in South Carolina, saved the party from a left-wing nominee who would have lost.

Credit Mr. Biden for running a disciplined campaign focused on being the anti-Trump who would crush Covid and unify the country. There’s no reason from the campaign to think he will do any better than Mr. Trump on Covid, except sound more serious. But his message fit the mood of a worried public tired of constant political warfare. His strategy of barely venturing in public, and barely answering questions, limited his potential for mistakes. And the media, united in trying to defeat the President they loathe, gave Mr. Biden a pass.

Mr. Biden’s narrow campaign message—Covid, character and pre-existing conditions on health care—leaves him with a governing dilemma. He has a mandate to end the pandemic and heal partisan divisions. But with the Democratic defeats down ballot, he lacks a mandate for the policies he promised his party’s left. Mr. Trump had more coattails than he did.

In the fine print of the Sanders-Biden unity document, you will find the most radical progressive agenda in decades. But few in the media other than these columns examined it in any depth. Mr. Biden rarely mentioned it. The Americans who voted for him mainly to defeat Mr. Trump do not want a radical economic, political or cultural agenda.

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Mr. Biden won’t say this publicly, but he will be fortunate if Republicans retain control of the Senate with the two Georgia runoffs in January. He will need the leverage of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to steer a middle course against House Democrats and the Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing in the Senate.

Our sense is that, left to his own instincts, Mr. Biden is not an ideologue like Barack Obama. He is a pragmatic man of the center-left who can work across the aisle. But he will soon be 78 years old, and his vigor is clearly on the wane. He will have to battle younger progressives, inside and outside his Administration, who will be frustrated by the divided government Americans voted for and will want him to cede power sooner rather than later to Kamala Harris.

Mr. Biden’s peril is that he will have accomplished his main campaign mission on the day he takes the oath of office: Ousting Donald Trump. He is setting the right tone as he begins to form a government. But the biggest obstacle to restoring more political calm and comity won’t come from the post-Trump Republicans. It will come from his own

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Actually next two years could be fun

it looks like it could be like...

Re: it looks like it could be like...

Buried with Hillary Clinton***

Re: it looks like it could be like...

My understanding is that Bill Barr and Tucker Carlson

"And you won't believe what they are finding!"***

"The outcome is shocking!"***

I'm not paying for WSJ...

Editorial

these are all encouraging thoughts***

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