President Biden has taken a lot of heat lately for his poor leadership skills. One recurring theme is that he lacks the decisiveness needed for the job.
Perhaps because early decisions on Afghanistan and Build Back Better worked out badly, the White House these days is wracked by “bottlenecks and indecision,” according to CNN’s
Edward Isaac-Dovere.
Mr. Biden is consistently unable to finalize decisions on issues, such as tariffs and student-loan debt, that have reportedly lingered for over a year. According to Politico, Mr. Biden’s inability to decide drives his staff “a little nuts.” He peppers them with questions. When he doesn’t get an answer, he uses it as an excuse to put off a decision while staff goes back to get more information.
Mr. Biden’s inability to decide is reminiscent of Barack
Obama,
who was famous for long periods of indecision, particularly on what to do about Afghanistan in 2009. Former Vice President
Dick Cheney
accused Mr. Obama of “dithering” on this question. Mr. Biden shared this view of his former boss. “I thought he was deliberate to a fault,” the future president wrote in “Promise Me, Dad,” his 2017 memoir. “ ‘Just trust your instincts, Mr. President,’ I would say to him. On major decisions that had to be made fast, I had learned over the years, a president was never going to have more than about 70 percent of the information needed.”
The 70% figure might have come from Mr. Biden’s decades in Washington, but it more likely came from
Colin Powell.
Powell had a 40/70 doctrine for senior leader decision-making, which held that if you make a decision with only 40% of the information, you are making it prematurely, but if you still haven’t decided by the time you have 70% of the information, you are no longer in control of events.
Decision-making is an essential demand of the presidency, and some presidents—including some of Mr. Biden’s most prominent Democratic predecessors—were especially good at it. When reporter
John Gunther
asked
Eleanor Roosevelt,
“How does your husband think?” she replied: “My dear Mr. Gunther, the president never thinks. He decides.”
Harry S. Truman
may hold the record for most tough calls in a presidential administration. Four months into his term, he faced the decision of whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, though he’d never even heard of the weapon while serving as vice president.
He also had to make a tough call to pursue Operation Vittles, which created the Berlin airlift and allowed West Berlin to remain a free city. Add to that hard choices on whether to recognize Israel in the face of opposition from his top advisers, to defend South Korea from a North Korean invasion, and to remove the popular Gen.
Douglas MacArthur.
Lyndon B. Johnson
admired Truman’s decision-making ability.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
quoted him: “You know the great thing about Truman is that once he makes up his mind about something—anything, including the A bomb—he never looks back and asks ‘Should I have done it? Oh! Should I…
Read More: Biden’s Dithering Irks White House Staff