Author Robert Merry writes July 22, 2020:
The Positive presidents relished the job and the grand necessity to move events by persuading, cajoling, bargaining with and perhaps occasionally threatening other players in the political arena. The great Active-Positive presidents all had fun in the job. They showed a zest and enthusiasm that was infectious, not just with the American people but also with members of Congress.
This doesn’t describe Trump. There’s no look of the happy warrior about him but rather a consistent bitterness and whininess. He demonstrates hardly any zest for the job and certainly very little enthusiasm for dealing with, cajoling, influencing, or even outmaneuvering the political opposition. The result is that he seldom outmaneuvers his adversaries at all.
And probably no president in American history has done more to make the big issues of the day about himself and his fate rather than about the nation and its fate. This is a bit of a giveaway that his struggles are driven by internal motivations, perhaps even internal demons of some kind or other.
All this helps explain why Trump has been unable to build politically on his basic fount of support—the 39 percent to 43 percent of Americans who give him a positive performance rating. If there is one thing his political style is not, it’s infectious. His negativity is a barrier to expansion in his overall public support; his inability to expand his public support is a barrier to success in governance; and his lack of success in governance is a barrier to eventual political success in November.
Thus do we see that Trump seems to be an Active-Negative. Presidents in this Barber category don’t have great track records. They include John Adams, a failed one-termer; Woodrow Wilson, a two-termer whose second term was among the most disastrous of our history; Herbert Hoover, tossed out after a single term because he couldn’t find a way to grapple with the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson, a foreign-policy failure of rare dimension; and Richard Nixon, the only president to resign the office in disgrace.
What about Biden? Of course, using the Barber analytical tool to assess the presidential character of someone who has never been president has to be considered a qualified enterprise at best. But the man has been at a high level on the national political scene for nearly half a century, and in that time we have been given a solid opportunity to observe him and assess his political attributes.
On the Positive/Negative scale, Biden would seem to be a Positive. He was excoriated early in the Democratic nomination battle for touting his ability over the years to work with fellow senators who had demonstrated their segregationist prejudices, including Mississippi’s James O. Eastland and Georgia’s Herman Talmadge. “We didn’t agree on much of anything,” said Biden, adding however, “We got things done.”
The outcry, much of it mean-spirited, was predictable, but Biden’s ability to work with senatorial colleagues was a hallmark of his image over the decades of his congressional tenure. The highly regarded Congressional Quarterly book of political profiles, Politics in America, praised Biden for his ability to work with North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms when Helms was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Biden was its ranking member. Said the book: “Biden’s ability to maintain lines of communication with all groups often has made him, rather than Helms, the key vote on Foreign Relations.”
This can be viewed as evidence of a Positive trait, based on the Barber scale. Even after 30 years in the Senate, said Politics in America, “he still exhibits the intelligence, drive and passion of his youth.” The key word here, in terms of presidential character, is “passion.” Positives demonstrate a zest for the job and an openness to people, even those in the opposition who represent impediments to success that must be dealt with through persuasion, cajolery, back-slapping, and old-fashioned horse-trading. Positives love that game; so does Biden.
On the Active/Passive scale, Biden seems to tilt toward passivity. This is difficult to assess, however, because you can’t know how a president will view the White House job with any definiteness until he or she actually becomes president. But Biden’s long Washington service reveals an adroit legislative politician who dealt with issues as they emerged, without much evidence of vision or big thinking.
Thus does it appear that Biden represents a likely Passive/Positive president. Recall, Barber sees presidents in this category as wanting to be loved and thus ingratiating—and easily manipulated. That indeed is one of the knocks on Biden by conservatives—that he is being manipulated in his campaign, and would continue to be as president, by his party’s emergent leftist radicals.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-presidents-who-went-war-5-best-us-history-164162?page=0%2C1
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-will-history-assess-obama/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-they-stand-the-american-presidents-in-the-eyes-of-voters-and-historians-by-robert-w-merry/2012/07/13/gJQA8tSaiW_story.html
https://www.lukeford.net/archives/updates/031027.htm
https://www.lukeford.net/archives/updates/040205.htm