Hunter Biden’s struggles give his dad a way to take on a problem

Hunter Biden has gone from being an embarrassment to a real problem for his father.

In the history of squalid presidential siblings and spawn, young Biden has lapped the field. Think silly Billy Carter, who tried to market his own brand of beer and was recruited by Moammar Gaddafi to be his Washington lobbyist; or weepy coke-dealing Roger Clinton; and through the years, so many other presidential relatives who tried to make a living off a successful dad or sibling.

The Trump offspring and in-laws used their orange-proximity to help score deals in Saudi Arabia and China, but they did it with their clothes on and noses clean. Yes, Republicans are excessive in their pursuit of a campaign issue; their bloodthirsty avidity makes it hard to tell if there’s anything there beyond the smoke and cinders of a life destroyed.

The president’s son is an open wound. He suffers from Cain syndrome: being a lesser son for whom a family tragedy – the death of his mother and sister in 1972 – curdled into a lifetime of dependency and depravity. He had an affair with his brother Beau’s widow two years after Beau’s death, citing grief as the reason. But there’s also the drugs and gun, the bawdy selfies, the flagrant attempts to make hay off his name, especially when his humble-bragging father called himself “the poorest man in Congress.” Until it is proved otherwise, I will find it extremely hard to believe that the president was a party to his son’s nefarious schemes.

But he enabled them. What on earth was Hunter Biden doing on that 2013 plane to China with his father, then the vice president? Why, after all of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, did Joe Biden countenance hundreds of thousands of dollars in “art sales” by his son in recent years, art – to my untrained eye – best displayed on the walls of budget motels? Who bought the stuff and why? Why was Joe Biden – one of the most empathic pols I’ve met; at least, he played one on TV – so slow to embrace the grandchild that Hunter Biden had fathered? Why, after the younger Biden tried to cop to a plea deal on tax and gun charges, did the elder Biden invite him to, of all places, a White House state dinner?

I’d be surprised – no, I’d be outraged – if the president asked Merrick Garland’s Justice Department to slow-walk or limit the criminal inquiry into his son. I suspect that the testimony, offered in July by two IRS agents, that the investigation was rigged will be sifted and sorted and diminished when we hear from their boss on the case, David Weiss, a Trump appointee held over by Garland. I would be shocked if anything Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has on the Bidens will prove substantial, although Vice President Biden’s alleged willingness to shoot the breeze with his son’s overseas investors was questionable at best. Jordan’s gambit is a political ploy: Benghazi not Watergate.

But it is not enough for the White House to slough off Hunter Biden’s various depravities by saying, he “is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter.” The attempt to peddle influence is a very public matter. The struggle to deal with a family member brought low by the new plague of synthetic drugs is a public issue.

While it is nearly impossible to evaluate a parent-child relationship from the outside, the circumstances of the case reveal something unsettling about the president. It may just be rampaging compassion for a troubled child, but there is an indulgence to it that is consequential. Could Joe Biden not have somehow sequestered his son, as other presidents have done with troublesome relatives? Could he not have told his son to refrain from selling his art until he was out of office? Could he not have told Hunter early on that “the DNA results say that this child whom you deny is a Biden, and I’d like to welcome her into the family?”

Unconditional love is something every parent understands and aspires to. But it’s not always the best thing. True love involves the teaching of boundaries and responsibility; it requires sanctions when a child misbehaves, to say nothing of criminal immorality. Joe Biden’s response to his wayward son conveys a softness, a permissiveness that damages his public reputation – and might cost him votes in an election where everything is at stake.

I can understand why the president has been reluctant to address this subject. It is family business. But dealing with a child who has drug and mental health problems is reflective of a larger, national crisis. The increase in drug-related deaths has been staggering. The difficulties in dealing with addiction are overwhelming. It is a national problem – not just in poor neighborhoods, but an epidemic from high-end suburbs to rural Appalachia – that Joe Biden could address from personal experience.

There is an opportunity here. The issue of drug addiction is alive, electric and very much with us. In an era of lazy divisiveness, it would be an opportunity to talk about something too many of us have in common. It would be a chance to grieve and mourn and to inspire – like Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing or Barack Obama after the Charleston, South Carolina, church murders.

I have been mystified by Democrats’ – and Republicans’ – inability to address an issue that has afflicted so many families, red and blue. Joe Biden could put his personal suffering to great public use and help rectify that.

Joe Klein writes the Sanity Clause newsletter on Substack, from which this column was adapted, and is the author of seven books, including “Primary Colors.”