A two-incumbent race for the presidency seems inevitable after Donald Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday and President Biden’s strong stand in his State of the Union address. Each man is running on the condemnation of the other’s record.  But accidents happen. 

For a moment, let’s imagine a different Democratic candidate for president, whether anointed by Biden or chosen by the Democratic Convention. What then? The immediate impulse is to focus on how that changes the current personality war. For example, the age issue could flip to a Democratic plus, but the new candidate would be a relative unknown.

But beyond the personality question is a more interesting dynamic. Four years of "president versus anti-president" has distracted American politics from the complex and burning issues of governance that should be its business. Zero-sum partisanship has been the most obvious result, but underlying the standoff has been the presumption that solutions, either from the right or the left, can make prudent governance unnecessary. 

Idealists want to create a better world for themselves by giving everyone lists of faults to correct. Curmudgeons want to limit public action to policing private property. Contending demands to solve governance issues rather than to manage them have created a deep hole at the center of the American political spectrum, creating thereby a game-changing opportunity for a new voice.

Examples abound of possible focal points for prudent governance: the tax structure and its effective supervision; access to quality education at all levels, including non-degree technical upgrading; encouragement of sustainable entrepreneurship in rural areas; employment security; retirement security; future-oriented infrastructure. None of these are problems to be solved, but rather challenges that need to be carefully addressed. Leadership is not about claiming to have the answers; it is about facing the questions with frankness about the advantages and drawbacks of various alternatives.

A similar approach could be used in foreign policy, whose focus has to be China. From 1949 to 1972, we denied China's very existence. After that, until President Obama's pivot to Asia, we ignored China’s effect on the global order. Since then, we have viewed China's rise as a threat to be controlled rather than as a reality to be understood and coped with.

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