The Patriot Post® · Looking Back

Republicans of late have spent a lot of time looking back, calling attention to prior catastrophes in search of better understanding and lessons learned. Democrats usually dismiss such efforts as time-wasting attempts to seek retribution for supposed past offenses.

There may be some truth to that, but there are other very legitimate reasons to resurrect unpleasant history. Can we not — and in fact, should we not — reflect objectively and thoughtfully about what has worked and what has not? Isn’t it a good idea to try to figure out how to keep painting ourselves into such tight corners?

An example is the recent, high-profile re-examination of our country’s COVID-19 pandemic response, culminating in last week’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s brutal interrogation of fallen hero Dr. Anthony Fauci.

An obviously sensible step in our pandemic reexamination has been to gather insights from Dr. Fauci — the leader and public face of our nation’s pandemic response — about both the origins of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of measures taken to control it. And we might have expected that Fauci’s extensive personal diary would be a treasure trove of useful information on those matters.

We should be careful here: it’s easy to forget the extent and depth of the pandemic, the worldwide uncertainty (and divergent views) on how to deal with it, and to slip into 20/20 hindsight. But what we’ve now learned about Dr. Fauci, both from his diary and his reaction to the relentless criticism today — including his dogged refusal to answer any questions from Senate examiners (invoking Fifth Amendment protection in each case) — is that he was far more invested in his own fame than in protecting Americans from COVID-19.

In retrospect, Fauci was simply not up to the job. His guidance on actions to fight the pandemic led to disastrous, long-term consequences. He fiercely resisted competing viewpoints, he was blinded by the adulation of a fawning media and trusting public, and his public statements were not always truthful.

I don’t know whether Fauci’s spectacularly poor performance warrants criminal prosecution, but it certainly provokes the question of how he could have been chosen, by two successive administrations, to lead such critically important work.

The answer, at least in part, is that Fauci is a lifetime bureaucrat. He joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1968, and in that NIH silo he built a stellar career as a medical researcher, an organizational leader, and a true world expert on infectious diseases. He authored numerous scientific papers and provided expert advice to government leaders regarding SARS, HIV, Ebola, and other public health threats.

But then, with the COVID storm, Fauci suddenly found himself serving two successive presidential administrations in leadership positions on matters of public policy with implications far beyond medical matters — lockdowns, vaccine mandates, school closings, and others — and selling those positions to a terrified public.

Dr. Fauci was in over his head. His bedside manner with the public was pretty good, but his executive experience and judgment were largely nonexistent. He failed, and we should strive to understand how we let that happen.

And here’s a very different example of looking back: the 2020 election.

The 2020 election flap won’t go away — to this day, leftists doggedly claim that the election was fair and transparent, and they constantly ridicule Donald Trump’s “baseless” claims that it was stolen. Point well taken: that was six years ago. What happened, happened. It’s over.

But rather than relitigating (for the nth time) the election that put Joe Biden in the White House, let’s ask the more fundamental question — how did such an obviously flawed candidate ever get to that stage in the first place? In the many-month ramp-up to the 2020 election, who actually believed Joe Biden to be presidential material?

Former President Barack Obama obviously did not. In 2008, as the Democrat presidential nominee, Obama chose as his running mate Senator Joe Biden — an established, widely known, non-threatening (and white) politician to “balance” the ticket. But in 2016, after eight years with Vice President Biden in tow, Obama pointedly bypassed him as a presidential successor.

Nor did Democrat primary voters consider Biden a strong contender, at least not through the 2020 candidate debates and early primaries. Over decades of trying, Biden had never won a primary election. It was only when the DNC, in a panic about the ascendancy of socialist Bernie Sanders and with help from South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, managed to push Biden to victory in the Palmetto State’s primary, and then on to win the nomination.

Biden’s stature and presumed capability to serve as president was based on his lifetime in the coddled cocoon of the Senate. He was elected as Delaware’s junior senator in 1972, at the age of 29; he served in that exalted body for seven terms, a job that requires exactly zero executive capability, until plucked into the executive branch on Obama’s coattails.

Biden ran a lackluster, pandemic-era campaign largely from his basement. He received more than his share of help from a very supportive media. In my view, there has never been a satisfactory answer as to how he somehow garnered more popular votes than any presidential candidate in American history, 15 million more than super-star Obama at his peak, reinforcing the importance of the GOP’s ongoing quest for improved election integrity.

Otherwise, the rest of the story is history — a meandering four years of Biden presidency, highlighted by the intentional arrival of somewhere between 12 and 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants into our country, Biden’s end-of-term nosedive, and his party’s trouncing by Trump in 2024.

To an old guy who has now been around for 20 presidential elections, it seems clear to me that we don’t always do a very good job in zeroing in on the best and the brightest candidates for the most important and difficult job in the world.

Looking at the whole picture, there is a remarkable juxtaposition of the two examples discussed above. Dr. Fauci, a world-renowned expert in infectious diseases, exercised significant influence during the early years of the pandemic — but per his own diary entries, he chafed under Trump’s leadership. Under Biden, who was never an effective executive, Fauci’s role shifted distinctly from adviser to decider. In retrospect, that was the worst possible tandem: a weak executive, ceding authority to an over-reaching bureaucrat.

Bottom line: Among the many lessons learned from our rearview mirror scan is that our process for selecting leaders for critical elected or administrative positions casts the die for success or failure. And in looking for executive leadership, be wary of lifetime bureaucrats and lifetime politicians. They may talk a good game, but delivering the needed results is an entirely different matter.