Joe Biden Is Not "a Disaster"
Some Never Trumpers want to pretend that Biden has been a terrible president. Let's do the math.
1. Biden Is Good, Actually
Out there in parts of Never Trump world some people feel the need to stipulate that Joe Biden has been a terrible president who is wrong about nearly everything and is captured by the fringe of the Democratic party and so on and so forth.1
You hear this argument both from people who say they’re going to write in Edmund Burke and people who say they’re going to hold their nose and pull the lever for Biden anyway.
This verdict is at best uncharitable and at worst mistaken.
So let’s talk about how a True Conservative should think about Joe Biden’s first term.
A presidential term is comprised of a thousand choices. We can agree—I hope—that no administration has ever proved wholly unobjectionable to any American?
Find the biggest Obama fan in the world and they’ll tell you that they didn’t like the patently cynical way in which Obama “evolved” on gay marriage. Or didn’t take the threat of Donald Trump seriously.2 And you can say the same for the people who believe that Ronald Reagan was a great president. For example: I suspect that many of the people who genuflect before Reagan today do not like his 1986 immigration law, which granted amnesty to roughly 3 million undocumented immigrants.
That’s because we don’t judge presidents by totaling up the thousand decisions they make into a giant ledger, which we then score with a plus or minus. We judge them by how they perform on the one or two most important issues of their term.
Let me give you some examples.
Ronald Reagan’s response to the emergence of HIV/AIDS was very much a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of this staffers treated AIDS as a joke. On the other hand, Reagan personally seems to have been concerned about the spread of the virus (he and Nancy had many gay friends from their Hollywood years) and when he stood up a Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic, he took its work seriously.3 That’s a complicated record.
The Iran-Contra affair was not complicated: Whether it was a crime or merely scandalous mismanagement, it was bad.
But we don’t judge Reagan on his AIDS response or Iran-Contra. We judge him on the two most important issues of his presidency: the Cold War and reforming the American economy.
Reagan won the Cold War. He didn’t do it by himself—he was working with a legacy of policies dating to Truman—but he was the guy who had to execute the end-game. And it is impossible not to credit him for walking the tightrope between pushing the U.S. advantage while also giving the Soviets enough outs that they didn’t feel the need to turn the war hot.
Reagan’s prosecution of the Cold War’s final years ranks among the greatest accomplishments of any American president.
On the economic front, Reagan inherited a recession and the economy was stagnant, the result of too much regulation and tax rates that were too high. Reagan cut the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 38.5 percent and reformed the regulatory state across a number of sectors, increasing efficiency and unleashing an economic boom that lasted 20 years.
Reagan got the two biggest things right. So that’s the top of his Wikipedia page.
George W. Bush is a counter-example. In 2003, Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). It’s not an exaggeration to say that PEPFAR has saved millions of lives in Africa.
Bush also expanded the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefits package, making lives better for millions of American seniors.
Finally, Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks was to wall-off Islam from the actions of al Qaeda and the Taliban. At a time when it would have been easy for the West to slide into a clash of civilizations, Bush took pains to define Islam “as a religion of peace” and define the conflict as existing between the West and terrorism itself. This was, as George Will might say, statecraft as soulcraft.
But when we evaluate Bush’s presidency, all those accomplishments count for very little because Bush started two wars which ended badly for America.4 So that’s the top of his Wikipedia page.
2. Old Man Biden
What goes at the top of Biden’s Wikipedia page?