"What the Navy story reveals is how dated and inauthentic the 80-year-old president’s view of family is."

Writes Maureen Dowd in "It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President" (NYT).

Once you could get away with using terms like “out of wedlock” and pretend that children born outside marriage didn’t exist or were somehow shameful. But now we have become vastly more accepting of nontraditional families. We live in an Ancestry.com world, where people are searching out their birth parents and trying to find relatives they didn’t know they had. I have sympathy for Hunter going into a “dark, bleak hole,” as he called it. I have sympathy for a father coping with a son who was out of control and who may still be fragile. With Hunter, his father can seem paralyzed about the right thing to do. But the president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl....

But that is his line, so let's try to understand it. Instead of saying this one thing is inconsistent with the rest of who you are, ask who are you if this is part of you? Dowd assumes there is a coherent, benevolent, good man, Joe Biden, and he's put family first:

Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that “the absolute most important thing is your family.” It is the heart of his political narrative. Empathy, born of family tragedies, has been his stock in trade.

And yet, I see in those words a knowledge that Joe Biden's empathy is not genuine. He repeats a canned message — a "mantra." He’s got a "narrative," and it's "political." Is the empathy truly felt? Dowd only says it's "been his stock in trade." That metaphor refers to what a shopkeeper has on hand to sell  you. 

So one way to read this column is a statement that the line he's been selling won't work so well anymore if he doesn't embrace the beautiful little granddaughter.

But you might think — as I thought on first read — that Dowd is living inside the fantasy that Biden is truly a good man, empathetically devoted to family, and he's just got this one blindspot. He needs to get up to date and see that enlightened people of today aren't ashamed of children born outside marriage. Oh, Joe, don't you see?! It's just not you?

But what if it is him?! One way to get clarity when perplexed about human behavior is to begin with the assumption that people are doing what they want to do. In that light, this one thing is not out of character. Rather, his character includes this one thing. You need to reassess the character. 

Let's go back to this line of Dowd's: "[T]he president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl." Dowd is really only talking about the success of the President's arguments. And notice that by saying "other messes," she is referring to the child as one of Hunter's "messes."

Here's how it makes sense to me. The "line" the President has drawn is a line that he thinks serves the interests of the man he favors, Hunter.

In the protection of Hunter, Joe Biden does not embrace any of the bad things connected to Hunter. He's pushing them all away — for Hunter. Hunter's fatherhood of this child is just another bad thing associated with Hunter, like cocaine or embarrassing selfies or corruption. The child is still a child, as inherently valuable as any other child, but the connection to Hunter is something extra that a staunch woman wants for the child she chose not to abort. That goes on the side of the line with cocaine.

As I said at the outset, it is Biden's line, and we need to try to understand it. I want to judge him, not help him. The President of the United States is not someone we need to strain to help.