Last night, Joe Biden announced that he would not stand for re-election. People will say he has been bounced. I am going to tell you why I don’t think that’s the case.
The analogy people keep using is taking the car keys away from an elderly relative. I think there are better ways to put it but it’s broadly on the nose. Biden has not taken this decision because he is unfit to be President but because he is not fit to run for President again.
That is not the same thing, and no-one should confuse the two.
This is not a man who should now be afraid for his legacy. It is secure.
People will argue about what that legacy is.
If Trump loses this election now Biden’s is even stronger than it looked last night, and last night it looked pretty strong.
The way the debate around Biden has gone in recent weeks was so infuriating to a lot of US liberals that Chris Hayes, the great MSNBC anchor, produced an outstanding segment on 11 July called This Is Not A Scandal, reminding the public that all Joe Biden has done is get old.
That’s it. That’s all. His electoral rival was an insurrectionist, a convicted criminal, and one who lost a civil trial which found that he had committed sexual assault, something he was actually boasting about even before he was elected in 2016.
Yet it’s been Biden at the centre of a storm.
I admire Biden a lot. I’ve written about him several times on this site, the first time after he was elected and the White House announced that it was continuing his Secret Service codename; Celtic.
Biden is a lifelong public servant and a profoundly decent man.
I want to just pay tribute to him and leave it at that; the plaudits he is getting from virtually every corner of the media and political class (save for the MAGA brigade) stand as a greater testimony than anything I can ever offer, and those who want to hate on the man and who will not be swayed by the evidence that they are wrong are not worth the time or the effort it would take to debate them on it.
He has been an outstanding President, a man of enormous accomplishments. If he were just a couple of years younger or half a mental yard sharper, he could, and would, have piled up even more of them. He was not brought down in disgrace but only by the merciless passage of time. I echo Hayes; all he’s done is get old. It comes to us all.
I think that this decision came from two places; a love of his country and a little bit of self-realisation. If Biden was completely sure of himself, he would have fought. If he was a selfish man who was all about feeding his ego he would have stayed in the race.
Biden has listened to his own deepening knowledge of himself and taken stock. He measured the loss of his youth and vigour, and the realisation that this had become a real impediment to the campaign, the most important American election of our lifetimes, and he bowed to what Lincoln called “the better angels of his nature.”
There is a lesson there. There are things beyond ego. There are things beyond personal ambition. There are more important considerations for people in positions of leadership.
We’ve had great men at Celtic, great leaders. We’ve been fortunate to watch any number of them out on the pitch. Scott Brown is a case in point, but I listened carefully to what Kieran Tierney said recently and paid equal attention to Joe Hart.
Brown quit Celtic because he knew his powers were fading and he did not want to play on at this club as a shadow of the player he was. Kieran Tierney said that he would not return to Celtic unless he knew he could be the player he used to be because otherwise it would not be the same either for him or for us. Hart knew in himself that he was past his peak as a player and that he would offer less with every game he played … and he was not willing to take the wages unless he felt like he could make the best possible contribution to the cause.
Brown could have coasted. He would have been less effective but he could have taken a one year extension and got by. Hart could have changed his mind and been welcomed by Celtic with open arms. Tierney has enough fans amongst our support that he could come back aged 33 and it would be acclaimed from the rooftops; that won’t happen because he knows we deserve better than that. This is respectful. This is leadership of a distinct sort.
Few managers stand down for reasons of age. A lot of them would continue in the dugout until the stress got too much or the evolution of the game progressed to a place where they looked like dinosaurs hanging on to the bottom rung of the ladder. Then you get someone like Klopp who gets that he’s been at the top too long to be doing himself or his club any good, and voluntarily walks rather than waiting for the sharp decline.
Directors stay longer than anyone. Too long. One of the great things about the US Constitution is that even if Trump wins in November if the world makes it through the four years that follow that’s that, and he’s gone and that problem never rears its head again.
Four years and you need to be re-elected. Two cracks at the Presidency, eight years in total, and you don’t get to serve another minute longer.
Term limits are there, so says the conventional wisdom, to prevent tyrannical individuals from taking power and never giving it up. But there has never been an election in which I’ve been an observer that was not focussed on one word above all; change.
The real benefit of term limits is that leaders who are past their best cannot just squat in place recycling the same old tired ideas and concepts and getting elected on the basis of name recognition alone.
In Britain, when single leaders have stayed in place for too long they’ve started believing that they have some personal mandate, that the office is theirs to do with what they wish and that’s when you start to get catastrophic errors in judgement like the Poll Tax and the invasion of Iraq. Egotism is common in British political leaders; Eden, Truss, May, Cameron, Johnston, all taking on a job much bigger than they were built for, and believing in their own bullshit.
We need term limits in our politics.
Just as important, we need them in our football club, at the very top of the house. Neil Lennon once said, and was criticised for saying it, that a football boss at Celtic has a managerial shelf life of three or four years; I disagree with him. It’s fine as long as the manager is open to change and innovation, but he was speaking for himself and he’s never been particularly innovative. Neither are those who hired him twice for the gig.
And that’s the point.
The people running Celtic are so small-c conservative in their outlook that this entire club is locked in place, repeating the same patterns – and the same mistakes – over and over again. Our current band of decision makers more and more resemble, to me, not a democratic state’s cabinet – they change all the time; the average term for a US cabinet secretary is three and a half years and the average UK cabinet minister serves for just two – but the old Soviet era Politburo, full of men advancing into old age, fawning and scraping at the feet of the leader, building sham alliances, nodding through policies designed mostly to keep their positions secure.
There are no fresh ideas in that room.
There is no “thinking outside the box.” People who are capable of that, and especially those prone to it, don’t get into that room in the first place. Every hiring practice of this club reveals that clearly; these people want to work with those who reflect their own views. Nothing that challenges the orthodoxy is permitted.
But what if the orthodoxy is wrong? What if it is badly wrong? What if it leads to gigantic mistakes, as UK governments tend to when they have been in office too long, and especially under single individuals who are convinced of their own genius?
The signs of rot are clear in our haphazard decision making. In the terrible failure to build a clear structure separating the football operation from everything else, and having a football man in charge of it. It is there in the utter disaster that is football governance in Scotland and our complete lack of interest in leading a change agenda. It is in a collapsing European co-efficient which has become a joke for our enemies to snigger at and a source of utter embarrassment.
Our club is filled to the brim with yes-men and stale thinking, and I spent some of last week talking about the youth academy and the problems we have there. This transfer window is another issue, as it’s basically a rinse and repeat of previous ones where the manager has been criminally let down.
Whatever lies at the back of it, whether this is a weird form of self-sabotage or just basic incompetence or whether it is simply a matter of fiscal conservatism taken to a ludicrous extreme, this is all down to groupthink that is not subject to change or review. These people are sure they are right to hang on. They believe that they can do no wrong. And they believe that this club is theirs to do with as they please.
All the while they claim they do this out of love.
Well, this very day, we’re watching the most powerful man in the world start his walk off the stage, the last great thing he will do in his life.
In his life.
Biden is in his eighties. This hasn’t just been his job for four years, and for a long time before; it’s been his purpose, his reason for getting up in the morning. He’s an old man with a big future behind him.
So, to accept that, to walk away from that role, that is an act at least in part about love, love of country, love of party, love of an ideal bigger than either. That’s the real thing. None of these people loves Celtic like that. Celtic is a vehicle for their self-esteem.
Many of them have been in their soft seats for way more than a decade.
Lawwell has been at the club much, much longer than that.
The average term of a senior director, including the CEO, in the UK is five years, a year longer than a Presidential term of office. The reason companies cycle their boardrooms and replace their CEOs with such regularity is for the very reasons highlighted here; they value innovation and fresh thinking in order to keep moving forward.
We are stuck in the mud. No-one can realistically deny that now. Stuck here in Scottish football, locked into a system where the frequent crises at Ibrox provide the directors with a reason not to move too far or push too hard, chained to bad sponsorship deals and stinking low-ball TV contracts, and falling further and further behind in Europe.
I’ll be writing more on that subject later on.
The Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last, who for an age now has been a Joe Biden super-fan, wrote a stirring piece thanking him for the decision to stand down, and he ended it with the following words.
“Presidents tend to be larger than life: Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump. Biden was never more than life-sized. Maybe it was the almost accidental nature of his presidency. Maybe it was the large and painful personal losses life had imposed on him. Maybe it was because he was already an old man when he ascended to the nation’s highest office. But Biden was never bigger than his office. I suspect that is precisely why he became a great president.”
Biden realised that the office and what it represented were more important than he was. That was, as JVL has said, where his greatness lay, and that was at the heart of the tremendously difficult, and momentously impactful decision he has taken.
What does Celtic really mean to the people who run it? What does a role on the board actually represent in their minds? A play-thing? An adrenaline shot or an ego trip? Imagine even one of them had the wisdom to do a little self-analysis?
What decisions would that person take?
Would he look at the areas where we’re succeeding – largely built only on beating, like a drum, a hapless opponent determinedly trying to destroy itself – and ignore the rest, and carry on believing he was a master of the universe even as we grow weaker out on the pitch? Or would he look at the areas where we have failed and where we are continuing to fail and wonder whether he was capable of finding the answers which would put those things right?
And if, in that final analysis, he realised, as Biden did at the weekend, that the challenge was just too great, that he could not chart a course to a better tomorrow, would he set aside the ego and muster up the love, and do the right thing for the club itself?
We’ll never know the answer. Because no-one in our board room is capable of even asking themselves that question.
It was Kennedy, in his inaugural address, who said the wonderful words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Biden heeded those words yesterday.
If only our board thought in those terms; “Ask not what Celtic can do for you, but what you can do for Celtic.” And the answer would surely be obvious.
It was another politician, Leo Amery, in the Norway Debate in the House of Commons, at the start of World War II, who, quoting Cromwell, turned to Neville Chamberlain, another well-intentioned man and a patriot, who had run out of solutions and could no longer inspire the confidence of the nation or the House, and said, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’”
And days later, Chamberlian did just that.
I think most Celtic fans will know exactly who I’m directing those words at.
If he had an ounce of Biden’s self-awareness or a fraction of his devotion to duty, he might even heed them.
Comments on this article are now switched off. I’m not wading through an inbox of hysterical nonsense all afternoon.
A brilliant piece James but the elephant in the room has no conscience only ego and greed. The only narcissist that’s worse than him is Trump. God help us all at Celtic and the world if either insists to continue to be incharge. HH
It’s all on Lawwell, his decisions from top to bottom, unchallenged.
The rest have their snout so embedded in the trough that they neither listen nor care what anyone thinks.
I am a big fan of Joe Biden, the people who were slating him because of his age should hold their head in shame, that was a disgrace that. It was a great piece James, just one thing to point out though, you mentioned various leaders in not knowing when the time is right to go, and you mentioned David Cameron, I will give him his due, he stood down as prime minister when they lost the brexit vote, he did not need to, but he did, so I give him credit for that. Kamala Harris is a terrific politician, and a very honorable lady, I’m a massive fan of the USA, and I watch what’s happening there closely. I will be one of these guys who will be up all night, and glued to the tv when they have their massive election in the next few months , like I was when labour triumphed north and south of the border in our general election. Joe Biden deserves respect, and I hope he gets it, it’s not easy being the president of the most powerful country in the planet.
I’m like yourself goodguy in that I like Joe Biden primarily because he has been a good friend to Ireland which I don’t think Trump will be or certainly not as good anyway for sure…
While I probably won’t be like yourself in staying up to watch The American Election all night – I did stay up to watch The Election here predominately to see what happened in The Six Occupied Counties…
It was very disappointing for me personally to see The SNP collapse but they did have just so many fuck up’s that it probably pissed too many people off this time around…
While Labour are undoubtedly ‘slightly’ better than The Tories they are at the end of the day still a shower of Unionist Butchers Apron Loving Bar Stewards of the highest degree – especially that wee twerp Kier Starmar who has openly stated that he is against a border poll for a United Ireland…
Undoubtedly the media played it’s part (not that I watched, read or listened to anything) but I did here a few backward ones on these shores here say that they were going with what they’d been ‘advised’ in the papers – Just what simpletons that there are then stalking the streets of Scotland when you here these ascertations in your local pubs…
I’m not sure how it works in America but I sincerely hope that their residents have more up top and make their own minds up, unlike some of my neighbours here in Scotland did buy ‘listening’ to The Scummy Scottish Media !
Hi James
Brilliant piece -you are a loss to politics – the Celtic board as the Politburo -brilliant! question who is going to be Gorbachev- some glasnost would help cos we could do w a pair of strikers up front
Imo, t’s a case of self preservin individuals, who have nae intention of movin theirselves from their current positions. Why would they, when they’re makin huge profit for theirselves and their eventual retirement. This isnae about the club’s ambition, it’s first and foremost about profit and makin rich men richer. Make what they can, while they can. It’s a well written article, tho one thing that you’ve missed out. The biggest enemy tae theirselves are our own support. The reason this board follow the same scandelous strategy time and again, is because they’re confident the support will still be gullable enough tae continue buyin ST”s, European ticket packages and club merchandise and they always do. It’s rake the millions in, don’t strengthen properly, no ambition for Europe, sit tight and take the usual ‘flak’ until it ‘dies down’ and then it’s on tae next season and exactly the same pattern, preceded by the usual silence. That’s the strategy.
Anyone who thinks if the Trump problem will disappear in 2028 once his term comes to an end (and he will win, I have no doubts about the outcome in November) is being naïve. I know that’s not what you’re saying. But those MAGA nutjobs have already put their succession planning in place by taking control of the Supreme Court and the plan is to take an even tighter grip with the ominous Project 2025. Trump might not be the president in 2029 (although I wouldn’t completely rule that out knowing how he works) but America will now be in the clutches of the Christian Right for a very long time. I am not sure how they will escape it.
Even if Lawwell was kicked into touch, we all know where the real power lies. Dermott obviously allows Lawwell to hold his position because they share the same vision for Celtic. Replacing people on the board who have had their day will solve nothing. What Celtic needs is an aggressive takeover which we know can never happen because Desmond has enough support from the shareholders to keep his dynasty in place as long as he (and his sons once he croaks) wants.
Celtic fans had the chance to prevent this from happening when McCann completed his 5 year project. It didn’t happen. So we are where we are because we didn’t have anyone savvy enough to take control of the club. Someone who knows how businessmen like Desmond work and someone with a true socialist spirit who believes in the good of the many, not of the few.
This is vomit inducing…..Joe Biden a decent man!! He’s sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to certain death after provoking and continuing the conflict when it could have been settled long ago. He’s fully supported Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Not to mention alleged financial improprieties. He’s an affront to anything associated with the Irish.
Such absolute rubbish. Sheer ignorance and pathetic tub-thumping.
You sound like a clown.
One of your best yet James.
If Lawwell had even a scintilla of love for Celtic he would have stayed away after the
10 IAR fiasco.
Unfortunately he is just a glorified Accountant. Not a visionary leader. A bureaucrat who lucked inas a puppet for Desmond. A safe pair of hands. So safe he has been rewarded by Celtic’s Board members, invariably recruited by himself, to the tune of approximately £17 million in salary, bonuses and shares in his almost two decades of tenure at Celtic. That figure for a CEO in Scottish Football is a disgrace when compared to the rewards available to even an English Championship Executive in a far more difficult football and business environment.
As obscene as his salary package was, if you add to the mix the cost of his interference in footballing matters, the missed opportunity costs of lowballing on transfers, failing to add resources annually to the football budget in preparing for lucrative European Competitions, the costs of replacing competent Football Managers who have left after butting heads with Lawwell over the Transfer Budget policy only then can you begin to see the true cost to Celtic of his stewardship.
Contrary to the Board apologists and Happy Clappers view of his tenure and his own claims of Celtic being ‘World Class in everything we do’, measured against similar sized European Clubs, Celtic’s performance in growing the business is decidedly underwhelming. Add to that the less than, per Club size and budget, embarrassingly uncompetitive offerings on the European Football stage you can clearly see the actual decline of prestige that the Club suffered over his span of years at the helm.
Lawwell by returning to Celtic as the new Club Chairman showed clearly his arrogance and disconnect with the majority of Supporters. His installing of his son as Chief of Scouting & Recruitment when he was grossly unsuitable and lacking in experience in that role was nothing more than Nepotism writ large. An appointment that was hugely ineffective and costly was just nothing more than the Chairman trying to install a Family Dynasty at Celtic and reassert his control on what he views as his personal fiefdom.
He is a malignant, toxic presence at Celtic and things will not improve while he is there in any capacity. His apologists state that his role as Chairman is purely symbolic, ceremonial and that he has no direct involvement with the day to day running of the Club are either naive or trying to misdirect as to his utility to the Club. Of course he does interfere directly. He doesn’t have to. Every Senior Officer currently at the Club was recruited and put in place by Lawwell. They are beholden him for their well placed positions.
They know his views on most aspects of the Club, his DNA is written throughout the Club systems and processes.
Peter doesn’t even have to be there for the Club to act in his image. His presence at the Club is merely a caress to his ego.
Celtic will never move on while he is even remotely connected with the Club.
Should be ‘..of course he doesn’t interfere directly’ in the last paragraph.
Great article James…Biden was indeed a patriot and honourable man…the praise for him is widespread, and justifiably so!
We all know the problems at our club, and that the majority of our board, ( especially PL,) need to move on! Change is urgently needed, in order to move forward positively, with the ever changing times in modern football and remove the staleness of thought, that regularly echoes from our board!
If the delays in transfer business are down to us waiting for BR’s precise signing targets to become available and announced, then we can just about accept that!
However, if this is another window of extreme parsimony, just to stay ahead of Sevco, then it is an absolute disgrace.
As many have commented, this is the season to get in the requisite quality for BR, in order to rebuild our laughable European reputation.
Domestic football takes care of itself.
Fans want to see progress in Europe, and show that Celtic Park, can once again, become a feared fortress for visiting teams!
Anything less is another insult to us fans, and the millions that are annually ploughed by us, into Celtic’s coffers!!!
I think I’ll stick with Clare Dalys opinion on this one, a true modern day heroine.
I’ve heard her views and they are typically one-note. Too many people with no understanding either of American politics or the Democratic Party have weighed in on a subject they don’t fully grasp. Not only is there complicated politics here, but Biden has long ties with Israel going back decades, to the beginning of his career. She, like a lot of others, speaks without the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. If I was in the mood I would show you every public statement by Biden going back to October and the start of the crisis explicitly telling Israel that civilians had to be protected and that Palestinian self-determination was a principle that had to be respected. At every stage. He personally intervened to make sure Rafah wasn’t invaded.
Beyond that, he has no influence on Israeli policy. The US President does not control everything that happens across the world. Israel makes its own internal decisions and they are in the grip of a right wing lunatic, a guy by the way who Biden has no time for.
Let me tell you what would have happened had Biden taken a “tougher” line on Israel in public.
(In private, his administration was way more aggressive than they can publcily admit)
First, the pro-Israeli wing of his own party would have gone off the charts nuts. The US media which is pro-Israeli would have crucified him. All of this would have emboldened Trump, who already had a narrow polling lead.
The furore and the national conglagration would only have benefited him, and not a single gun or bomb would have been diverted in the meantime. You want to set back the Palestinian cause decades? Help Trump back the White House; the architect of the current mess is Trump and his decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a green light to Netanyahu and the most extreme elements in their government.
Politics in the US is not a fairytale world and until this weekend you had two options; a President who has urged restraint and who respects human decency and cares about Palestine or a psychopath who would have given the Israel’s ground troops if they’d asked for them. That’s the reality. It doesn’t gel with the simplistic back-of-the-matchbox view of the world some people have, but it’s why good people struggle to get things done.
In addition to that … this “blood on his hands” narrative is lazy, biased and at its heart even dishonest.
If you think the US President can just stop arms shipments you don’t understand how the system over there works.
The sales of most of those weapons were approved in 2021. Way before the current crisis.
The contracts are signed. The deals are done. Congress has signed off on them and Congress would over-ride a Presidential veto to make sure that they were sent regardless. Even then, Biden paused sales in relation to civilian deaths.
Treaties going back to 2016 commits the US to arms sales to Israel … legally binding international treaties. So it is nowhere near as simple as a lot of people evidently believe.
James, I normally enjoy your writing but this is the worst article of yours that I’ve ever read.
We all have personal bias but yours seem to have clouded your judgment here.
I’ve had many relatives suffer from alzhiemers and dementia and Biden has been showing the signs even in the early stages of his presidency – and that’s early stages of the presidency not dementia. He has not been fit to hold public office for a long time and should have been removed before now.
I also dispute your portrayal of Biden as one of the good guys. When George Bush’s republican government needed Democratic votes to approve the disastrous war in Iraq, they went to Biden to secure that. He was keen enough to assist, the rest is history.
There is also the footage of him gloating about using his influence to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor from his job for daring to investigate the now perma-stench of corruption surrounding his son Hunter Biden. And lets not forget that ‘The Big Guy’ was implicated directly in Hunter’s dirty dealings.
The Hunter Biden thing has been done to death, and 95% of what has been alleged is, to put not too fine a point on it, utter bollocks.
Completely disagree on Biden’s fitness to remain in office.
Iraq, like the current Middle East, was a far more complicated scenario than surface level understandings. We’re not talking here about people who were literally “in the room” and invented intelligence and twisted facts to get to what they wanted. A lot of people simply exercised bad judgement and believed what they were told. The real criminals, like Blair, knew exactly what they were doing.