What Joe Biden Could Learn from Nelson Mandela About Knowing When to Quit
Picture a career politician well into his seventies who runs for and wins his nation’s highest office. His election as president marks the end of a dark era in his country’s history, and it will surely warrant prominent mention in the first paragraph of his obituary. In his inaugural address, the elderly president promises a new beginning to his compatriots and vows to heal the deep divisions that plagued his beloved country.
That man isn’t Joe Biden. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected chief of state in 1994 and, of course, the first man of his race to occupy its presidency. As Biden and his most trusted advisers stay the course or end his bid for reelection in the fall, they would do well to consider Mandela’s decision at a comparable juncture in his life’s journey.
Simply put, Nelson Mandela had no interest whatsoever in running for reelection in 1999 when he was going to reach the same age—81—that Biden is today.
“Mandela was always adamant that he was a one-term president,” says John Battersby, a veteran South African journalist and former editor of the Johannesburg-based Sunday Independent newspaper. “He felt that he had done what had to be done to complete his life’s work. For Mandela, it was natural to put the interests of his country before the interests of himself because he had literally sacrificed a normal family life to ensure the liberation of South Africa and its people.”
Mandela had multiple reasons for categorically ruling out a second term, some peculiar to his native continent. During the 27 years Mandela spent in the prisons of the apartheid regime, he observed with mounting dismay how many of Africa’s icons of liberation had become addicted to power and stubbornly refused to relinquish it.
“He had seen how leaders dragged their countries into the ground, how [President Robert] Mugabe treated Zimbabwe like his personal property,” notes Xolela Mangcu, a professor of sociology and history at George Washington University. “All these people who clung to power for their dear lives couldn’t separate themselves from their countries, and Mandela would have been negatively affected by their example.”
But other factors transcended Africa. Mandela, the political prisoner, avidly read the biographies of George Washington, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and other towering figures of Western democracies who had bowed to the rule of law and transferred power peacefully.
“He was a remarkable individual who understood the importance of succession,” says Ghaleb Cachalia, a former member of the South African parliament whose parents were close friends of Mandela and fellow anti-apartheid activists. “Perhaps it was the globally revered status he was accorded well before he embarked on building a new political dispensation in South Africa that gave him the comfort of achievement and removed the need to hang onto power.”
As he contemplated a run for the presidency of South Africa following his release from captivity in 1990, Mandela always saw himself as a transitional figure whose tenure would only be temporary.
“He tried to use the fact of a one-term presidency as a lesson in democracy to his people,” says Jonny Steinberg, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Council on African Studies and the author of Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage. “He wanted to get across the idea that he was a tenant in the office and that his stay would be brief.”
There are, to be sure, several significant differences in the circumstances facing Mandela and Biden as octogenarian leaders contemplating the prospect of a second term in office.
To some extent, it was easier for Mandela to stand down as chief of state a few weeks shy of his 81st birthday. His African National Congress (ANC) would never lose the 1999 election, regardless of whether Mandela sought reelection. The ANC’s fortunes did not depend on Mandela. The party was going to prevail no matter what.
From the outset, Mandela signaled his presidency would be one term. He delegated much of his presidential powers and duties to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, even proclaiming Mbeki South Africa’s “de facto president” during a 1997 visit to London midway through his five-year term.
“He broadly understood his role as performing important symbolic functions rather than running the government,” observes Steinberg. “It was always understood that Mandela would play the role of president and Mbeki would serve as a kind of prime minister.”
Despite delegating specific issues to Kamala Harris, Biden has never done anything of the kind with the Vice President.
However, in other ways, Mandela was a far more viable candidate for reelection than appears to be the case with the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for the White House.
“Mandela had an ability to concentrate and express his views that was impeccable,” recalls John Carlin, author of the bestseller Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made A Nation, who was The Independent newspaper’s Johannesburg bureau chief from 1989 to 1995. “He was far stronger physically than Biden. You weren’t anxious that he might trip over and fall. He was manifestly in better mental and physical shape than Biden is.”
As Biden and his inner circle ponder his fate, they’ll surely consider his legacy, and they should note that Mandela attached great importance to safeguarding his legacy. Some parallels between the two men are striking in the eyes of the South African journalist John Battersby.
“Just as Joe Biden restored the dignity and international standing of the United States after the ignominy of the Trump presidency,” he says, “so was Mandela’s combination of moral authority, self-belief, and astute strategic insight able to lead a democratic and non-racial South Africa back into the international community of nations.”
His fellow South African Xolela Mangcu concurs, but the scholar questions whether Biden will quit the race.
“Mandela had a sense of history and a studied approach to his legacy, and he had read up on George Washington,” notes the social scientist. “He understood that it wasn’t up to him to solve everything, and that’s where Biden is failing. Biden is overestimating his abilities and showing something that has often been associated with power-hungry leaders around the world, the seductiveness of power.”
One seasoned analyst of U.S. politics argues that Biden must immediately cede the path to the White House to a younger and more dynamic leader of his party. Failure to do so will sully Biden’s legacy irreparably—and heighten the risk of a catastrophe that, according to the Democrats, is staring the country in the face.
“Mandela understood that if you want to be a great man of history, you don’t cling to power like small men do,” says Jonathan Alter, the Washington Monthly contributing editor and author of four books about U.S. presidents. “Biden will come to understand that he will be remembered as a first-rate president if he leaves. But if he refuses to do so and loses to Trump, he’ll become a pariah in history. They won’t even talk to him in Delaware.” The choice for Biden between ending up more like Nelson Mandela or a Ralph Nader shouldn’t be that hard.
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