The Peter Principle President

You may not recognize the name, but you’ve no doubt seen the Peter Principle in action. Laurence Peter coined the term in a 1969 book, identifying the fact that many people continue to rise in an organizational hierarchy until they reach the point where their skills are insufficient, and then they fail. But not just fail, also drag down the organization, too. Imagine the top salesman who gets promoted to front-line manager, or the first-level supervisor who focuses just on keeping her employees happy because they will perform better. They get promoted based on past performance, but their skills no longer match the challenges they face. The salesman needs to stop trying to sell and instead manage. The manager must now focus on leadership, which sometimes entails telling people unpleasant truths.

Some people rise to the new challenge, and some organizations try hard to evaluate based on potential as much as past performance. But the Peter Principle remains far too common in our daily lives.

Take for instance our soon-to-be-former President, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.. By all accounts, young Joe Biden was a modest man “with much to be modest about” in Churchill’s memorable take-down of his rival Clement Attlee. He was never a great student, a great athlete, a great leader. As a child of the lower middle class, he keenly felt the uncomfortable disapproval of the wealthy and elite. But he was, however, ambitious to prove he belonged. That combination of ambition and disapproval fueled him to work hard, but also to fib a little. Then a lot. As the good sisters (nuns) taught Joe and me, each sin makes it easier to sin again.

Now if exaggerating your résumé or spicing up your family history were disqualifying for federal office, the halls of Congress would be vacant. As would the White House. And probably several executive suites. But those attributes do tell you something about a person, and no one is seriously questioning Biden’s lifelong problem with this issue: the New York Times even did an exhaustive listing of it.

Despite this character flaw (or perhaps enabled by it), Biden was a successful retail Democratic politician. He used his stories to buff up his “middle class Joe” bona fides, which were already quite strong. He identified with workers, families, and average Americans. He ran for a local council position in 1970 and won, then for US Senator from Delaware in 1972 and won again (in a real upset). Up to this point he was just another promising local politician, but the death of his wife and baby daughter in a car crash weeks after the election made him into a public figure of bipartisan sympathy.

Biden rode that good feeling into perennial re-election in Delaware, while gradually climbing the Senate’s seniority lists. While he strongly advocated for traditional Democratic party positions, he was most well-known for either gaffes (everyone should read this 1974 profile of him from Washingtonian magazine) or extreme changes of position. He said he would approve a Robert Bork nomination for the Supreme Court before supervising the rejection of the same, was against “gays in the military” but later for, was mildly pro-life then pro-choice, was against the first Gulf War but for the second one, pro-integration but anti-busing, a key supporter of tough anti-crime laws which he later called “his biggest mistake.” Depending upon your politics, he was open to change or morally flexible.

What was abundantly clear was Senator Biden always had his eyes set on the White House, and his first attempt came in 1988. He initially garnered some interest before a series of substantiated stories of plagiarism and résumé aggrandizement forced him from the field in a mere ninety days. He returned to his Senate seat and position as chair of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. In the former he presided over the circus that was the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, angering both conservatives for allowing attacks on the nominee and liberals for presiding over the vote that still approved him! In the latter, he built a public reputation as someone knowledgeable in foreign policy matters, despite the memorable quote from Robert Gates that Biden was “wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Biden remained a powerful Senator who could be reliably re-elected, knew the rules and peculiarities of the institution, and could get things done, but he still harbored desires for the Oval Office. His next opportunity came in 2008. He lasted only as far as the initial Iowa caucuses, where he received support from less than 1% of the attendees. When eventual nominee Barrack Obama needed someone older, “knowledgeable” in foreign-policy, and reassuring to working-class white voters, Biden found himself a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

While the personal relationship between the two men was strong, it was regularly tested by Biden’s frequent gaffes, which the staff referred to as “Joe bombs.” Biden made off-color comments, took policy positions publicly without pre-coordinating them with the President, but served effectively as contrarian voice in policy discussions and a conduit to the Congress. He felt he was in the driver’s seat for the 2016 race until his son Beau died, leaving the family devastated. Joe passed on his golden opportunity, leaving Hillary Clinton to lead the ticket which was upset by Donald Trump.

Fate took a hand as they say, and the 2020 electorate was looking for a normal, routine, sedate adult, while the campaign would be limited due to the pandemic. Joe was free to limit his gaffe opportunities, and President Trump was simply unable to resist tweeting his campaign from one outrage to another. And you know the rest of the story.

That’s the Joe Biden story. Scranton Joe would have made a great mayor, as he was at his best in retail politics. His family wouldn’t have had the temptations it later suffered, and favoritism or small-scale corruption are often overlooked at the local level. He might even have made a very good Governor, for a small state with fewer foreign connections. This would have avoided the frequent foreign policy mistakes. But Joe had some good luck and more ambition than talent, ending up in the Senate. Nothing in his Senate service stood out. When you read more about it, you see countless times where he either temporized, changed positions suddenly, or was simply out of his depth. He was as often criticized by his own party as by his opponents. He certainly never attracted an ounce of support to be President, until Barrack Obama needed someone vanilla to balance his ticket.

Even there, Joe was still the one getting caught on mike about “a big f*cking deal”, or jumping the President to support gay marriage, or being against the Bin Laden raid. Hillary Clinton was always going to be the next nominee, and it was only the shock of her loss, the trauma of the first Trump term, and the tragedy of the COVID pandemic that gave him an opportunity.

Everything Joe did subsequently was consistent with someone over-matched by the office. Rescinding Trump’s border policies en masse without understanding the consequences? Carrying out the Afghanistan withdrawal without adequate planning or an eye to what happens next? Listening to advisers stroke his ego as the new FDR and pump billions into an overheating economy? Temporizing over Ukraine when it mattered most? Insisting he was totally fit for duty when his public appearances clearly showed otherwise? Waiting until the Democratic establishment had to threaten him to withdraw from the race, then literally ending the nominee discussion by throwing his support behind his Vice President? Swearing the justice system is fair and he would never issue a pardon to his son, until he later said it was biased and he did issue one? And remember, we still await the tell-all books from his White House and campaign staffs, which will no doubt be full of more examples.

Setting aside the shock many Democrats and Progressives feel at the election results, nothing about Biden’s tenure was surprising, including how it ended. Joe would have been better a big fish in a small pond, rather than the (un)lucky preeminent example of a Peter Principle President. But that is what he will be remembered as, because that is what he is.