Joe Biden is in Surfside, Fla. But why?
The fact that this question will be received in most quarters as facetious if not outrageous is one more little data point illustrating the metamorphosis of the American president from chief magistrate to chief priest.
There was a time — and it wasn’t even all that long ago — when presidents weren’t expected to make ritual pilgrimages to scenes of suffering.
As John Dickerson recounts in his very readable The Hardest Job in the World, a series of tropical storms pounded the United States in 1955, doing more damage than had been inflicted during any hurricane season on record. Dwight Eisenhower was on vacation in Gettysburg and did not interrupt his family retreat. There was no public outcry or criticism — this was utterly normal. Vice President Richard Nixon joked that Washington staffers used President Eisenhower’s absence to catch up on their sleep. “He has the ungodly habit of getting up early,” Nixon said. The storms kept up: In 1957, Hurricane Audrey killed more than 600 people in Louisiana’s Cameron Parish. President Eisenhower was again nowhere to be seen. He did not visit Louisiana, did not make a heartfelt public speech, did not rush to put together a federal response. No one thought this was remarkable on his part.
Things were much the same for John Kennedy when Hurricane Carla struck Texas in 1961. He did not tour that scene or the scene of a catastrophic East Coast storm a few months later. He did not parachute in and perform five acts of sympathy theater.
“Neither Kennedy nor Eisenhower was callous,” Dickerson writes. “Ike believed, like most did at the time, that local governments, civil defense forces, and the Red Cross were supposed to stack the sandbags and distribute food packets and blankets after a storm hit. The federal government’s job was to rebuild structures. Eisenhower believed that if the federal government preempted the local duty to care for neighbors, it would jeopardize the core American value of Americans giving back to their communities.”
The man who really changed that was Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously was a genuine idealist and a grotesque political opportunist. Johnson was an FDR man through and through, and he admired his legendary predecessor’s ability to forge an emotional bond with the American people through symbolic displays of presidential goodwill. Expanding on that strategy, Johnson, over the objections of his own emergency advisers, visited New Orleans after a hurricane drowned 75 people there, convinced by the powerful Louisiana senator Russell Long that his arrival on the scene would be the American answer to a Roman triumph — which it was. It was an unqualified public-relations coup, and the major newspapers, as Dickerson reports, “portrayed Johnson in action-hero terms.”
Johnson repeated the performance in subsequent disasters, and President Nixon continued the new tradition. Johnson’s gambit, as Dickerson puts it, produced a “merger between the duties of the office and the requirements of politics that gave birth to the presidential first-responder obligation.”
. . .
But President Biden is in Florida neither to find facts nor to direct rescue efforts. He is there in his magical capacity. Dickerson writes that the president fills many roles in American life, among them “first responder” and “chief priest.” I would only quibble that, in the current configuration of the presidency, those are one role rather than two.
Magic!