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2024 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Beneath the Public Persona: The Real Psychology of the Biden Presidency

Author : Stanley A. Renshon

Published in: Presidential Leadership and Foreign Policy

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the reality beneath President Biden’s well-established “Good old Joe” persona. We examine evidence of the president’s capacities and conclude there is no dispositive evidence that he is not the driving initiator of the administration’s major policies, or the one saying yea or nay to those brought before him, whether he is or is not deeply involved. They are his and his administrations’ decisions and therefore we proceed on the basis that they are legitimate to evaluate. A president’s psychology reflects a pattern of ambitions and abilities developed and shaped over time and applied to his circumstances and purposes once in office. They affect not only a president's ambitions, but also his thinking about to achieve them. We examine the president’s high self-confidence in his own views, and how they developed over decades of public life. Mr. Biden overcame many significant obstacles, personal and professional, to reach the presidency. He suffered the enormous and tragic losses of his first wife and child in a car accident and later his son Beau to brain cancer. He has also survived several near -death experiences from brain aneurisms. That he has persevered and overcome these tragic circumstances is a reflection of his resilience. Mr. Biden’ core psychology—his strong ambition, his focus, determination, persistence, and risk-taking audacity, along with his strategy of practicing almost every conversation in advance, have been key aspects of his success. Yet, little is known about them. There is no analysis of Biden’s universally acknowledged tendency to talk, always at great length. I term this BidenTalk—reflecting that talk, of all kinds, plays a large role in Biden’s political persona. It is not fully appreciated how much of a role it also plays in his core psychology. It does so as a vehicle for forging strategic connections to whose he wants or needs in his circle of unquestioning supporters. Making these kinds of powerful emotional connections is deeply embedded in his understanding and practice of presidential leadership. We examine these features while analyzing ‘The Puzzle of Mr. Biden’s Progressive Presidency,” and then in a detailed analysis of the President Biden’s psychology and judgment in his decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

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previous chapter Still a Special Relationship? The Effect of the Administration Change on the U.S.-Israel Relationship
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Footnotes
1
Cf.; Eustachewih (2021); see also O’Neill (2021), Montague (2022), Chamberlain (2023), Christenson (2023), Brown (2023), and Shear (2023).
 
2
These kinds of observations bring administration rebuttals to “add context” to some of the incidents. See Sadeghi (2021).
 
4
Cf., Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary is quoted as wishing, “If only I had the energy of an 80-year-old President Biden.”
 
5
The article reported an NBC News analysis that, “Biden used the shorter set of stairs to get on and off the presidential aircraft 37% of the time. In the past seven weeks, he has used them 84% of the time, or 31 out of the 37 times he has gotten on and off the plane.”
 
6
Responding to the NBC report the White House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a seven-day commander in chief. Andrew Bates, a deputy press secretary, said “President Biden works every day and because chief executives can perform their duties from anywhere in the world, it has long been common for them to spend weekends away from the White House.”
 
8
Cf., Mirengoff (2021).
 
9
Cf., Chris Murphy (D-CT), a strong senate support of the president is quoted (in Abutaleb (2023) as saying, “He’s got fluency on foreign policy that gives him confidence—he knows he can win the argument…”.
 
10
Cf., According to Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, “He has a kind of mantra: ‘You can never give me too much detail.” See Shear et al. (2021b).
 
12
This is not a newly discovered trait for Biden. Cramer (1987, 428) reports in his extensive portraits of six politicians with White House ambitions including Joe Biden that he was sensitive about his intelligence. Biden himself had doubts about whether he would make the one-third cuts that Syracuse imposed on its entering class, however, “in law school if someone said he wouldn’t make the cut, well, Joe was ready to step outside and settle who was smarter.”
 
13
There are numerous “fact checks” and other reports that correct Biden’s many incorrect statements (Flegenheimer, 2019). The title of one recent New York Times story (Shear & Qiu, 2022) “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel,” gently captures the issue. Less gentle was a CNN segment featuring Daniel Dale (Howe 2023, emphasis added) that contained the following examples of a much larger list:
He had – this president has a pattern at this point of either inventing or embellishing stories about his own past, his biography. He did it three times in one speech last month alone. He claimed he had witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, when he actually showed up about 6 h later. He claimed that his grandfather had died just days before he was born himself at the same hospital. In fact, his grandpa died more than a year before in a different state, not the same hospital. And, he also repeated a favorite false story that I and others have debunked over and over again about a supposed a conversation with an Amtrak train conductor he was friends with who was actually deceased at the time the conversation would have had to take place.
And that’s not all. There are some more serious ones, in my view. Previously in his presidency, he claimed at one point he’d been arrested during a civil rights protest, when in other versions of the story, he just said an officer had taken him home from a protest. He said he had visited the Pittsburgh synagogue where worshipers were killed in a 2018 mass shooting. In fact, he’d actually spoken to the rabbi, but never, but never went. And he’s made a whole bunch of others, too. He said at one point — Republicans like to bring this up — he said that he used to drive a tractor trailer, used to drive an 18-wheeler. Never happened.
The White House later clarified he used to drive a school bus at one point, for, as a job, briefly. School bus, of course, not an 18-wheeler.
So, whatever his intentions, whether it is, you know, foggy memory about stuff that’s going on decades ago or deliberate embellishment, this is an unfortunate pattern that keeps coming up again and again with Joe Biden.
 
14
This analysis makes no effort to fully document the very large number of such statements. Sufficient evidence is provided to firmly establish that it is a career-long issue for Mr. Biden. Later, we explore why it is so central to Mr. Biden’s core psychology and what purposes it serves.
 
15
Cf., “Biden, who served for 36 years in the Senate, is an institutionalist to his core and has tried to operate under the constraints of those institutions—unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, who repeatedly pushed the boundaries of executive power.”
Mr. Kim’s analysis of Mr. Biden not having tried to push the boundaries of executive power is mistaken (Ollstein et al. 2021). Examples include the administration’s policies to reduce student loans, an eviction moratorium, and vaccination mandates all of which were enjoined by federal courts but continued by other, executive means by the president.
 
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Metadata
Title
Beneath the Public Persona: The Real Psychology of the Biden Presidency
Author
Stanley A. Renshon
Copyright Year
2024
Book
Presidential Leadership and Foreign Policy

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-52798-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-52799-9

Copyright Year: 2024

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52799-9_11

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