by Martin Schram
The sunshine bathing his Rose Garden is so bright that Joe Biden can’t help but squint as he looks out and starts saying hello to the many people he invited into his backyard. He knows them so well, by now, that he simply calls them by their first names. He also understands that even in his sunlit yard, they are surely still feeling their dark cloud is somewhere overhead. It’s been following them everywhere, ever since that godawful day.
“Mark and Jackie, I want to tell you it’s always good to see you, but not under these circumstances. … (I)t takes a lot of courage to come to an event like this. … Mark and Jackie, whose son, Daniel, was a first grader in Sandy Hook Elementary School, Daniel loved sports, loves outdoor sports, getting muddy. I see my friend, Fred Guttenberg. His daughter, Jamie, was a freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. She was an accomplished dancer. I see Brandon Wolf, the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub; he survived, but his two best friends died. Greg Jackson, who was just walking down the street when he was caught in crossfire of a gunfight.
“Of course, I see a close friend of Jill’s and mine, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who is here, who was speaking with her constituents in front of a grocery store in her state when she was shot and a member of her staff was killed. They’re here, and their pain is immense. … (I)f you’ve gone through a trauma … every time you show up at an event like this, it brings back when you got that phone call.”
Joe got that phone call 49 years ago. (Car accident; not a gun.) But, as Joe discovered, the feeling never really goes away. It becomes a core part of who you are. And that is what all of us are discovering now, about Joe.
We have seen a president who seemed made to lead by the strength of their exceptional leadership gifts — FDR. We have seen a president who seemed made to lead by inspiring a new generation with his presence and eloquence — JFK. We have seen a president who seemed able to lead as if he was portraying Hollywood’s dream combination of those two — RR.
President Joe Biden has none of the above qualities of traditional or theatrical leadership. No Ph.D. has been awarded for a thesis on Scranton Joemanship. But somehow, as we have been beset by the COVID-19 pandemic and all the leadership failures that crippled us in recent years, we seem to be seeing the one sort of commonsense leadership that we have long lacked. Indeed, we may have seen it coming together, maybe just a bit, on Thursday, as a summertime sun tried to make all in the Rose Garden forget about our misbegotten spring.
Scranton Joe was there, challenging the world’s most irrationally naysaying nation to finally give common sense a try by accepting broader, tougher, new-era modernized controls on the gun-slaughter that has long bloodied the United States and baffled the world as the United States seemed unwilling to curb our addiction to combat-styled, rapid-firing guns.
Thursday, Biden announced executive orders and other new initiatives: Require “ghost gun” kits, that users can assemble into unregistered guns, to bear registered serial numbers and require presale background checks. Place new restrictions on brace modifications that can transform handguns into mini-rifles. Promote “red flag” state laws to permit authorities to temporarily confiscate weapons from persons who have been judged potentially harmful to others. Biden also wants to reestablish the assault weapons ban we had for a decade, before then-President George W. Bush allowed it to expire.
President Biden reported to us some hard-hitting news that our mass media must have missed last month as we mourned two mass shooting tragedies in six days, where a gunman in Georgia killed eight people (six of them Asian Americans) and a gunman in Colorado killed 10.
“You probably didn’t hear it,” news anchor Biden told us, “but between those two incidents, less than one week apart, there were more than 850 additional shootings. 850 that took the lives of more than 250 people and left 500 injured. This is an epidemic, for God’s sake, and it has to stop.”
Ordinarily, we’d just nod our heads at that sort of talk and know nothing will change. But Ordinary Scranton Joe may be the one unusual leader who can make common sense happen — especially in a desperate America that finally sees we are indeed battling not one national epidemic, but two.
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.
