President Joseph Biden’s performance at the Town Hall on CNN last night was impressive in its ordinariness. How so? Consider with amazement the following:
- He is able to answer the questions posed to him.
- He expresses genuine empathy for other human beings.
- He demonstrates a mastery of his own administration’s policies.
- He remains calm and does not shout at or belittle people who ask him tough questions.
- He is honest.
- He is a naturally dysfluent speaker (grappling with a lifelong propensity to stutter), yet he speaks in strings of grammatically correct, complex sentences.
- He eschews all personal praise and rejects the notion of him as a personality at the center of government policy.
This should be the minimum — the lowest possible bar — for a President of the United States, but the last four years defined a different floor.
Thank you, Joe Biden.
