Biden wants to be a transformational president — but he’s no Eisenhower

All presidents possess a mix of executive skills and political acumen. In an interview in McKinsey Quarterly, author William Hitchcock said about Dwight Eisenhower’s executive leadership: “His approach to managing the presidency and managing his team: discipline, organization and a clarity of who’s responsible for what.” These are all characteristics possessed by a good issues manager, and they’re opposite of what we see with the Biden administration. 

Eisenhower did not focus on grand transformational plans. He anticipated problems and pushed for results. Hitchcock points out, “His administration bolstered America’s defense (increasing military spending to an unprecedented peacetime level of 10 percent of GDP), embraced business (and saw GDP rise by more than 4 percent per annum, even accounting for the Korean War and its conclusion), and approached or achieved a balanced budget nearly every year in office.”

Joe Biden, on the other hand, sees himself as transformational and apparently believes his accomplishments are on par with those of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” or Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” In an early assessment of the Biden presidency in March 2021, New York Times opinion writer David Brooks said, “The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality. … This is not socialism. … This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.” Biden’s “redefined government” has the national debt charging toward $32 trillion like a runaway train.

Eisenhower’s leadership skills were shaped by military command in World War II, when he devised strategy, aligned forces operationally, and executed with tactical agility to achieve stated goals. Biden’s leadership was shaped by nearly 50 years in elective office, where the currency is securing headlines, passing legislation, spending money and then “selling it” to your voters as accomplishments. Eisenhower helped to change the world but did not seek greatness as president or talk about himself using superlatives. Biden is the opposite in several significant ways.

The management maxim of Eisenhower, as recalled by Hitchcock, was: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Plans are worthless because the situation always changes. But if you have been planning all the way along, you have a sense for how to reason through a crisis, especially at those moments when time is of the essence.” He inherited a war in Korea that his team brought to an end. He helped to restrain global expansion of communism, and put America’s economy on peacetime footing. He managed a nascent civil rights movement with finesse.

Biden inherited a post-pandemic economy that was ready to reopen and inflated it. He squandered America’s energy independence and reversed security at the southern border. He has further alienated people in our divided nation, despite pledging to restore unity. His administration has politicized COVID-19 vaccines. He has ignored North Korea, which continues to test its missiles and issue ominous threats, and worse, he ignored warnings about Russia’s ambitious expansion plan until it was too late. Instead, the Biden White House has worked to transform America’s economy to one based on green energy and to restructure American society to one based on “equity.”

One of Eisenhower’s first acts was to lift price controls, signaling the reestablishment of the free market and bolstering optimism in America. Over the next two years, the market rose 93 percent, according to reporting in Investor’s Business Daily. On Biden’s first day, he signed executive orders restraining the fossil fuel industry. Over the next two years, Americans experienced higher energy prices and the government has been forced to tap our strategic oil reserve to try to curb prices.

In his second year as president, Eisenhower’s approval rating soared to 87 percent among Republicans and 50 percent among Democrats. By contrast, Biden has registered only a 5 percent approval rating from Republicans and 83 percent from Democrats. Eisenhower was elected to win peace and return America to prosperity. Biden was elected to heal a fractured nation and tame the scourge of COVID. Only Eisenhower executed his mandate for the good of the nation as a whole. 

A PBS documentary on Eisenhower, “Character Above All,” lists his attributes as “love, honesty, faithfulness, responsibility, modesty, generosity, duty and leadership, along with a hatred of war.”  A successful executive demands diversity of thought and uniformity of focus. In contrast, Biden demands philosophical purity and conformity to a fixed set of beliefs.

The main job of a skilled issues manager is to not allow a problem to balloon into a crisis. Eisenhower managed the difficult issue of school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark., arguably averting deeper fissures in race relations. That’s the opposite of what Biden did with the border and with violent crime in major cities: He has allowed both to fester and morph into crises that are contributing to our wide political divide. 

Had Biden truly tried to heal divisions, rather than exacerbating them, he might have achieved his quest to be viewed as consequential and might be riding a wave of positive momentum today. Instead, he made many wrong first moves because he evidently did not realize that you “manage” the presidency you have, not the one you want to create. 

Dennis M. Powell, the founder and president of Massey Powell, is an issues and crisis management consultant and the author of the upcoming book, “Leading from the Top: Presidential Lessons in Issues Management.”