Biden’s “As Long As I Gave It My All” Sums Up Leftism’s Flaws

Effort and intentions are no substitute for results

The most significant moment of President Biden’s interview with ABC News came toward the end. It went like this:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.

It was an exchange that transcends the political news of the moment, about whether Biden will stay in or leave the presidential race. It points to a bigger issue. Biden, when he talks about “I gave it my all,” is talking about effort, inputs, and intentions. Stephanopoulos, when he talks about “Trump is elected,” is talking about results and outcomes.

Focusing on effort has been trendy in recent years, especially in education circles. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on “growth mindset” and the University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth’s work on “Grit” have been influential, and a useful corrective to the mistake in schools of over-emphasizing results or cognitive skills and under-emphasizing effort or noncognitive skills, especially at young ages.

But even Dweck herself warns: “We also need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: ‘Great effort! You tried your best!’ It’s good that the students tried, but it’s not good that they’re not learning.” And Duckworth makes an outcome-based case for grit, too: “Grit predicts success over and beyond talent.”

So many costly errors in public policy and political economy have resulted from focusing too much on effort, inputs, and intentions and not paying enough attention to outcomes and results. 

There was the welfare system that paid people not to work and to have children without getting married, a system that Irving Kristol in 1971 described as “a vicious circle in which the best of intentions merge into the worst of results.”

There was deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that fueled street homeless populations. 

There are state and local tax increases that drive talent elsewhere.

There are rent control and stabilization laws that make housing less affordable overall by locking residents in place and by discouraging new construction.

There is government spending that worsens inflation.  

There are Connecticut government “fair rent commissions” that leave apartments with nonfunctioning refrigerators, moldy bathrooms, and the smell of sewage. 

There are socialism and communism that claimed to be aimed at reducing inequality but wound up privileging apparatchiks and creating deadly famines.  

Other writers have made this distinction between intentions or effort and results or outcomes. Dalibor Rohac, who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a 2013 article, “In Defense of Cynicism,” that “Western societies would benefit from a more cynical mindset — one in which good intentions and doing good through the political process would not automatically command approbation and in which policies would be judged solely by their outcomes.” 

A professor at the London School of Economics, Kenneth Minogue, is scathing on the topic. In “The Servile Mind.” Minogue writes, “‘I meant well’ is feeble because it slides into self-flattery, and this is important because one of the main corruptions of the moral life consists in baseless self-satisfaction.” He writes: “Good intentions alone may be better than bad intentions, but that’s about the best of it.”

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, in their book, “That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In The World It Invented And How We Can Come Back,” write, “American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort.”

Even New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, in parting ways with coach Bill Belichick, announced, “his work ethic is so strong. That's what I looked at. He always gave us the best he had. There wasn’t a shortage of effort” and also said, “This is a results business….We’re looking for someone who can help us get back to the playoffs and win....I am very upset when we don’t win games.”

I don’t want to be dismissive of effort. It’s an important ingredient in achievement. I don’t even want to instrumentalize effort. There is some virtue in trying hard, even if it doesn’t translate into a win. But presidential politics, like professional football, is such a zero-sum game. Only one person, one political party, wins the presidential election. In the Super Bowl, only one team wins. The other one loses.

In Biden’s case, he could have answered Stephanopoulos’s question differently by offering a more results-oriented answer: “Well, if I quit the race today and then Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer lose to Trump, then I’d really feel even worse than I would if I’d have stayed in myself and lost, because I think I’m a stronger candidate than any of them and would be a better president and still have a better shot at beating Trump than any other Democrat does. But really George, this isn’t about my feelings, let’s not make that mistake, it’s not even about the Democratic Party, this is about who is going to get the best outcomes, the best results, the most success for America and for the world in the years ahead.” (In fairness to Biden, after the “I gave it my all,” remark, the president did rapidly turn the conversation in a substantive and future-oriented direction: “who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?”)

Trump, at his best, communicates this results orientation in a future-oriented way: In 2016 he had a line about America winning economically and militarily: “We’re gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning.” Not we’re gonna give it our all or I gave it my all, but “we’re gonna win.”

My purpose here, though, is not to cheer on Trump or to pile on with bashing Biden. It’s to try (and, I hope, not just try but also succeed) to add some value with analysis that generalizes from particulars to patterns. If someone is talking about effort or intentions or inputs more than outcomes or results, it’s often a sign to beware. 

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