Best wishes for President-elect Biden

By Richard Pennington

Six months ago, I penned a Korea Times column titled “In dire need of political maturity.” In it, I urged a hyper-conservative Korean friend to accept ― or at least not actively oppose ― the liberal government of President Moon Jae-in. Doing so, I told him, was wise and patriotic.

Now I find myself in a tenuous position. Having voted for Donald Trump in the American presidential election on Nov. 3, can I do what I urged my Korean friend to do back in May?

Since Joseph Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have evidently won a razor-thin victory, am I man enough to congratulate them and offer my support? I do not deny that I have serious doubts about Biden's fitness to serve in the country's highest office for the next four years. Some of his proposed policies cause me to blanch. Although I have no enthusiasm for him, I profoundly respect the American political system. If it can be assumed that the election was fair and above board, I am willing to go along with the results.

I offer Biden my support, tepid though it may be. It is given with the realization that Trump was perhaps the most vilified president in U.S. history and that the mainstream media abandoned all pretenses of objectivity in its treatment of him even before he took office in January 2017.

The 2020 election was less a Biden victory than a Trump defeat. Who, I ask, was fooled by all those polls that predicted a Biden landslide? Democrats and their leftist supporters should have known it would be close. Whether we are talking about votes cast or the Electoral College, Trump was nearly-elected. Had that occurred, as one of my American friends opined in October, “it will be Katy bar the door.”

Trump's core of true supporters numbered between 7 and 10 million. Most of the other 71,399,434 (at last count) people who voted for him were like me ― we held our noses and put a check mark on the ballot by his name and that of Vice President Mike Pence.

As stated earlier, I wanted Trump to win. He did not, and now is the time for healing. So far, Biden has taken the high road and urged that all Americans ― left, center and right ― come together for the good of the nation. The extent to which Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will cooperate with Biden or fight him tooth and nail through 2024 remains to be seen. For now, though, the departments and agencies of federal, state and city governments can begin preparing for a smooth transition of power. Democracy has no greater hallmark than this.

Regardless of Trump's bluster, he will not barricade himself inside the White House and refuse to go. I am aware of the accusations of voter fraud and other shenanigans, especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, and court challenges will follow; they are almost sure to be tossed out. The 2020 presidential election is well and truly over.

When he won in 2016, I indulged the naive hope that Trump would rise to the occasion and start to speak and behave in a “presidential” manner. That alone would have made a huge difference in how he was perceived by the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives of both parties and by the media.

I believe it was his style more than his substance that rubbed people wrong. Had he never issued a sophomoric Twitter rant, never turned White House press conferences into wrestling matches and never gone out of his way to brag and preen, he probably would have prevailed. He did not, and he will be loading up the moving vans in two months.

Trump was often under siege during his presidency, although much of that was his own fault. I wonder whether any American president has ever faced such threats to his physical safety. A non-scalable metal fence was erected around the perimeter of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue shortly before the election to deter enraged leftists in case of a Trump victory.

This is not the time or place to assess Donald Trump's legacy, although the country's 45th president had some solid achievements during his tenure. Rather than moan, groan and criticize, I will take a deep breath and congratulate the Biden/Harris team on their success at the culmination of a grueling campaign. They will soon face the considerable challenges of running the U.S. government and bringing together a fervently divided populace.

I am not happy to concede the election, but I do so because American democracy has endured for almost 250 years. There have been hotly contested elections before and bitterness over losses, yet we have always managed to conciliate and move forward. Anything else would be politically immature.

Richard Pennington (raput76@gmail.com), a native of Texas in the U.S., works as an editor at a law firm in southern Seoul. He has written 22 nonfiction books, including "Travels of an American-Korean, 2008-2013." He is the director of an NGO, the Committee to Bring Jikji Back to Korea.