had begun as the most establishmen-
tarian of the Democratic candidates,
now seemed to understand that some
sort of Obama-era restoration was in-
sufficient to the moment.
Events in the following weeks shaped
the Biden candidacy even more than the
competition had done. Almost imme-
diately after becoming the presumptive
nominee, he had to confront two reali-
ties: the Trump Administration’s bun-
gling of the pandemic response, and
widespread demonstrations, under the
banner of Black Lives Matter, that had
been sparked by the killing of George
Floyd, in Minneapolis, and the legacy
of systemic racism. Biden was forced to
recognize that if his Presidency was to
meet the challenges facing the country
he would have to act with no less dis-
patch than Obama, who had come into
office, in January, 2009, amid an eco-
nomic collapse. More and more, Biden
made the case that, as President, he would
emulate Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
In late October, Biden spoke at Warm
Springs, in rural Georgia, where F.D.R.
had a home known as the Little White
House and would come for polio treat-
ments. Biden’s theme at Warm Springs
was national healing. “These are all his-
toric, painful crises,” he said. “The in-
sidious virus. Economic anguish. Sys-
temic discrimination. Any one of them
could have rocked a nation.” He vowed,
in a sense, to go well beyond his instinct
for centrism. To manage the pub-
lic-health emergency, to deal with eco-
nomic distress and catastrophic climate
change, he would have to build a broad
political coalition and act with compas-
sion and determination. “God and his-
tory have called us to this moment and
to this mission,” he said. “The Bible tells
us there’s a time to break down, and a
time to build up. A time to heal. This
is that time.”
The success or failure of the Biden
Presidency will depend on whether his
speech in Warm Springs was a matter
of stagecraft or true intent; his political
fate, and the country’s, will depend on
whether he can unite a radically divided
country (at least to some degree) and,
at the same time, make good on his
commitment to confront these myriad
crises with anything like Rooseveltian
ambition. The Senate will not make it
easy. Biden will find himself challenged
by the same sort of ideological and po-
litical resistance that Obama met when
Mitch McConnell vowed to thwart him
at every turn.
The task of repairing liberal demo-
cratic institutions and values awaits
Biden, too. The country’s intelligence
agencies concurred that Vladimir Putin
had acted on his long-standing antip-
athy for Hillary Clinton and meddled
in the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
Historians and experts in cyberwarfare
will continue to argue about the degree
to which Russia interfered in the elec-
tion and the degree to which it mat-
tered. What is less mysterious is why
Putin preferred Trump. The Russian
leader wished to be left alone, free of
American intrusion in Ukraine, free of
NATO’s influence in the Baltic States
and in Eastern and Central Europe.
So long as the United States was tied
up in its own internal tumult, so long
as the new President disdained post-
war international alliances, Putin was
pleased. For him, America’s pretensions
to moral authority on the world stage
were—particularly after its military ad-
ventures in the Middle East—a colossal
hypocrisy. “The liberal idea,” Putin told
the Financial Times last year, has “outlived
its purpose.” Trump’s victory seemed
to vindicate Putin’s dark conviction.The pandemic revealed the human
cost paid by states without humane so-
cial safety nets and equal access to med-
ical resources. It also revealed the capac-
ity of capable democratic leadership.
Angela Merkel, in Germany, and Jacinda
Ardern, in New Zealand, were exem-
plary in the way they communicated the
facts with their populations and acted
to contain the virus based on scientific
evidence and rational decision-making.
Trump’s behavior, by contrast, resem-
bled the denialism and the autocratic
style of Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil.
To rebuild trust in democratic pro-
cesses, Biden, assuming that he wins,
needs to restore faith in the integrity of
government itself. He needs to empower
scientists and medical experts at the
C.D.C. and the F.D.A. and oust char-
latans at the Department of Justice and
fossil-fuel lobbyists at the E.P.A. Trump
routinely mocked figures of integrity
like Anthony Fauci and threatened to
fire them. He railed against the perfidies
of the “deep state,” slashing programs
and regulations, undermining the work
of devoted public servants. It is encour-
aging that Biden has said that on his
first day in office he would “stop the
political theatre and willful misinfor-
mation” and “put scientists and pub-
lic-health leaders front and center.” He“I thought working from Hell would be temporary.”