"Make It So" Joe

What Biden's bizarre decision to withhold support from Israel ahead of the Rafah push reveals about his presidency.

There's a fun little 80s movie, Head Office, that includes a sage bit of wisdom. As a mentor explains to a new-to-the-job young executive, "never make a decision." Comedy aside, the notion contains an unassailable reality: Decisions matter, in business, in personal life, and in politics. This is further illustrated by another under-the-radar movie, Margin Call, that mirrors the Lehman Brothers collapse at the start of the 2007-08 financial crisis. In it, the head of a big Wall Street firm (purportedly a mash-up of Merrill Lynch's ex-CEO John Thain and Lehman Brothers' ex-CEO Richard Fuld) explains to a young analyst what his job at the top is all about:

John Tuld: So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.

Peter Sullivan: Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.

John Tuld: Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.

Peter Sullivan: Yes.

John Tuld: I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.

Tuld then instructs his room full of Wall Street sharks to take a stark and consequence-riddled course of action, and in doing so, validates the notion that making decisions is the hard-but-vital job at the head of any organization.

This all puts a spotlight on Joe Biden, who prior to becoming President spent his entire adult life as a legislator rather than an executive. Joe graduated law school in 1968, became a city councilman in Delaware in 1970, and entered the Senate in 1972.

Legislators don't make "buck stops here" decisions of consequence. They vote for laws, then leave the execution of those laws to someone else. This gives them an "out" if those new laws don't work as intended: they get to point the finger of blame at whoever is in charge of executing those laws, or at the other party for messing with the laws they intended to write, or at the public for not fully supporting those laws, or at the existing conditions for being too difficult to fix with just those laws. In other words, lots of "it's not my fault."

Spent a lifetime insulated from having to make decisions of consequence in the real world, and you risk developing a disastrous mindset.

In Biden's case, that mindset appears to be a Jean-Luc Picardesque "make it so."

• Joe decided the nation needs to go "green," so he declared "make it so" via executive orders and massive spending bills.

• Joe decided that the US should exit Afghanistan, so he declared "make it so" with an openly declared final date.

• Joe decided that flinging open southern border is a good idea because Orange Man Bad, so he declared "make it so" without any real plan for managing the millions who want in.

• Joe decided that the COVID pandemic would best be managed by continued mask mandates, lockdowns, and coerced vaccination, so he declared "make it so.”

• Joe decided that the Israel-Hamas matter must end in a two-state solution, so he has engaged in a series of split-the-baby decisions about supporting Israel while also sending relief to the Gazans, and choosing the most colossally wrong time - Israel's big final push into Rafah - to say "make it so" by withholding military aid and failing to share significant intelligence information.

There's more. Oh, so much more. But you get the idea.

Joe seems mostly lacking a vital skill of any decision maker: assessing conditions in the field. As anyone who has ever done a home improvement job is aware, "conditions in the field" is your bane, the equivalent of "no plan survives first contact with the enemy."

Decisions beget more decisions, and good deciders adjust as they go. A race car driver is constantly adjusting his steering as he corners hard turns. A passel of NASA engineers trying to send men to the moon "build a little, test a little," and adjust their designs as they see how they perform. A good CEO knows when to apply the principle of "sunk costs" and pull the plug on an idea that isn't working (Apple gave up on self-driving cars, Tesla shut down its low-cost car programs). Likewise, a good decider can slow or reverse a previous decision if that decision isn't working as intended (countries are reversing course on coal and nuclear power as wind and solar fail to keep up).

Joe, on the other hand, is like a baseball pitcher who, despite having given up half a dozen home runs, keeps throwing the same fastball, positive that if he just keeps to his original plan, it'll all work out.

How else to explain the insistence on the Afghanistan withdrawal timetable no matter how disastrous, or the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates despite the growing evidence of ineffectiveness and worse, or the continued influx of migrants, or the refusal to pull back on the spending that caused the persistent inflation we are suffering?

His answer to all this is to tell us, against all evidence, that everything is great and that he's to thank for all that greatness.

The only course corrections we are seeing are not about acknowledging that past decisions didn't work. Instead, they are about winning the November election. Biden is finally making some token gestures at the southern border, because even he can't ignore how many voters are upset by the flood of migrants. His Federal Reserve (spare me the "independent" folderol) is keeping interest rates high to mask the inflationary effects of Joe's rampant spending (wanna bet, however, that we get a rate cut in the fall, in time to goose the markets but not so soon as to goose inflation before the election?).

And, most recently, the bizarre decision to choose now, the eve of Israel's big push into Rafah, to put the brakes on America's support for an ally that suffered a barbaric atrocity. That, too, appears driven by the election. Michigan and Wisconsin, both homes to large Muslim populations, are vital to Biden's electoral map, and he likely needs both in order to win in November. Biden saw non-trivial "not Joe" vote tallies in both states in a primary where he essentially ran unopposed, and I'm sure his highly consequential pre-Rafah decision is driven by that voter message.

A "make it so" approach to governance is a passing of the buck. It is "I want this to be the state of things, you all figure out how to get there, and if you can't, you have yourselves to blame, not me." It doesn't make room for feedback or adjustment, but it's how our government is being run today. There was an adage, back in the day, that legislators make lousy presidents. Watching Biden bumble his way through the most important job in the world reinforces that aphorism.

With terrible consequence. Our Best-and-Brightest fretted and nattered that Trump would prove to be mercurial toward our allies and on the world stage, and create uncertainty and distrust in the process. As is so often the case, the “projection” proved to be a more accurate assessment of their guy, not the other guy. Legitimate libertarian skepticism about foreign adventures aside, the Afghanistan withdrawal was stupendously mismanaged, and sent a useful message to every hostile entity in the world about our current Commander-in-Chief.