His critics said the president of the United States was too old.

At the time he was inaugurated, he was the oldest chief executive ever to take the oath of office.

His advanced age prompted his opponents to argue that he was not up to the demands of the job. They said the president was a captive of his advisers and handlers, a leader dependent upon the guidance of his underlings just to meet the responsibilities.

The national mood exacerbated these doubts and anxieties.

The president had been elected not so much in his own right but as a reaction to the troubled and tumultuous tenure of his predecessor, a one-term occupant of the Oval Office who came to power as an outsider. That predecessor had vowed to clean things up in Washington and restore power to the common people but instead had presided over four years of chaos and upheaval.

Nor did the state of the economy help things.

Inflation had been a problem when the president took office and it soared during his first year in the White House. The fact that the people who had put him in office struggled to pay their bills and make ends meet persuaded them to think that the old man at the helm was in over his head.

Members of the opposition party all but licked their lips at the prospect of the next presidential election.

A detached and doddering old man presiding over both the nation and a tattered economy? restoration of the vanquished order, its partisans reckoned, was inevitable.

Somehow, though, Ronald Reagan confounded his opponents’ expectations, perhaps because they persisted in underestimating him.

Worse, they encouraged the American people to underestimate him, which had the effect of making minimal achievements seem remarkable. Reagan’s opponents set the bar so low for him that he stepped over it effortlessly, smiling genially as he did so.

When Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, he sailed to victory over Democrat Walter Mondale, the vice president to the man the nation had rejected four years earlier, Jimmy Carter.

“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme,” Mark Twain supposedly once said.

History may be rhyming now.

The current president of the United States, Joe Biden, and the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, have different leadership styles, but in key ways, they had much in common.

Not the least of these ways is that they induced political opponents, again and again, to take them and their capacities too lightly.

Democrats in the 1980s gradually, painfully, came to appreciate Reagan’s skill as a communicator but even that belated appreciation encouraged them to overlook his greatest asset—his will, the steel spine that hid behind the man’s sunny smile.

Anyone who has traveled, as I have, to Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Illinois, knows how far the son of an itinerant shoe salesman had to travel to reach Hollywood, much less the most powerful office in the free world. Only a soul of immense drive could have made that journey.

At key moments in his presidency, that strength of will sustained him. Reagan used unemployment to curb the inflation that threatened to consume both the nation and shorten his tenure in the White House, trading the suffering of millions for that of hundreds of millions. It was a cold-blooded choice, but the warmth of the man’s smile obscured his ruthlessness.

And led his opponents to think he was a pushover.

Biden, too, invites those who oppose him to dismiss and belittle him.

Like Reagan, Biden also had to travel a great distance to make it to the White House. His blue-collar beginnings make it easy—too easy—for opponents to mistake him for a lightweight.

But if Reagan’s hidden strength was his will, Biden’s is his patience. He is willing to wait for the moment that promises the greatest chance of success, even when his own allies often wring their hands in despair.

Biden, like Reagan, faces an opponent who dreams of restoration.

Reagan won re-election because inflation slowed, and the economy lifted before he had to face the voters again.

Inflation now is slowing as Biden prepares to seek a second term.

Both these very different men—these very different leaders—trusted strengths that they hid from others and tolerated opponents’ denigration as they did so.

Reagan prevailed that way.

And Biden?

Well, history may be rhyming again.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
The City-County Observer posted this article without opinion, bias, or editing.