The Tragedy of Joe Biden, Once More
The Tragedy of Joe Biden, Once More
The president blew it. On Wednesday, he was forced to confront the result of his hubris.
HAD JOE BIDEN MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE, he may very well have found himself right now in a flurry of celebrations of his career.
On Capitol Hill, at the White House, and in private gatherings around the country, he would have been fêted by Democrats—and some Republicans—eager to highlight his record of accomplishments and heap gratitude upon him. He would have been hailed for saving American democracy from Donald Trump and then sacrificing his own ambitions to do it again.
Instead, Biden didn’t make the right choice. He was too late in sacrificing his own ambitions. And on Wednesday, he welcomed Trump back to the White House as president-elect, pledging to help facilitate a smooth transition to power for a man he has labeled a uniquely sinister threat.
It was vintage Biden: Ever dutiful and cheery, even in moments of torment; holding to the traditions and customs that Trump had refused to provide him four years ago.
Last week, after the electoral beating his vice president and party took, Biden delivered a perfunctory post-election presidential unity message with a jaunty smile, insisting “the American experiment endures,” and repeating his patriotic refrain that “you can’t love your country only when you win.”
He’s awfully chipper for someone so complicit in Trump’s return.
After all, it was Biden’s denial and intransigence that likely turned the tide of history. Had he stepped aside earlier, and Kamala Harris or another Democrat created enough distance from him, the election could very well have ended differently. Biden would be lionized as a selfless public servant. Trump would have been repudiated. Instead, Harris was defeated after spending just three months trying to convince voters she represented something different from his unpopular policies.
Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place was reckless and self-indulgent and it infuriated the party he has loved and represented for more than half a century. Had he stepped aside earlier, and Trump still won, Biden would have been spared far more of the blame. Instead, we ended up here.
“Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake,” Jon Favreau said on Pod Save America. He added that after Biden melted down at the debate, he and his team continued to stress there was a path forward, even with internal data showing Trump would beat the president with 400 electoral college votes. “They were privately telling reporters at the time that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. So they were shivving Kamala Harris to reporters while they told everyone else, ‘not a time for an open process,’” Favreau said.
That period of time before and after the debate was not insignificant. It cost the party an opportunity to better assess where things stood and who could lead them. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times that party poohbahs had planned on a primary if Biden could have been convinced to step aside sooner. Maybe Harris would have “done well in that and been stronger going forward,” Pelosi added, but “because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been earlier, it would have been different.”
In other words, Biden made a mess of it all.
THE SAD IRONY IS THAT BIDEN is one of the least likely politicians to end up shunned. He spent a career overcoming doubters, rising above defeat, and putting in decades of work. He persevered through health crises, and soldiered through the deaths of a spouse and two children. Biden didn’t make enemies; rather he made friends of everyone, including partisan Republican opponents. He is the rare person who is asked—repeatedly—by friends to eulogize them when they die.
From 2008 through 2016, as President Barack Obama’s vice president, it was Biden who had relationships throughout Congress and around the world. It was Biden who had to negotiate legislative cliffs. And it was Biden who delivered.
After losing his son Beau to cancer, Biden was unsure he could mount a presidential campaign. He then watched Obama back Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016. Four years later, Biden succeeded in reaching the White House and rescuing the nation from the damage of Trump’s first term.
Sworn into office fourteen days after a deadly insurrection, Biden came into his presidency believing maybe, after January 6th, the GOP would work with him. While a few of them did—enough to pass consequential laws and help him amass a record of bipartisanship unimaginable during Trump’s first term or both of Obama’s—most of them would not.
By 2022, the data were clear that voters didn’t want to reelect Biden because of his age. Beyond that, his job performance—once viewed positively for his efforts to pull the country out of the pandemic—had become deeply unpopular, too. He saw polling, just months into his term, showing immigration was becoming “a growing vulnerability” for him and that “nearly nine in 10 registered voters are also concerned about increasing inflation,” according to memos written by pollster John Anzalone. By that summer, the data showed crime had also become a significant weakness.
But Biden and his team refused to accept it. They spoke of inflation as fleeting, and stubbornly talked about positive economic indicators that would, eventually, stave off a recession, even as polls showed prices were driving down consumer sentiment and perceptions of the economy.
That same year, Gov. Greg Abbott started busing immigrants to sanctuary cities to call out the hypocrisy of Democrats. Gov. Ron DeSantis then followed suit. New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser began to plead with the Biden administration for resources and assistance to handle the new floods of immigrants in their cities.
The Biden administration failed to mitigate these political threats to the party, and to the president’s reelection. But even if he had managed to do so, his age would likely still have disqualified him, as majorities of voters in his own party wanted him to step down.
He could have blessed an open primary in his party anytime that year, or in 2023, or at the start of 2024. And he surely knew it. After all, Biden not only contemplated a one-term pledge in 2020, he had considered it when pondering a potential 2016 campaign.
“I thought of myself as being a transition president . . . but things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen,” he told CBS’s Robert Costa, shortly after stepping down from the ticket.
It didn’t happen.
BIDEN’S INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE—his slowing, quiet voice, his verbal slip ups and awkward pauses—meant he was unable to go out and sell the infrastructure law, or CHIPS Act, or the clean energy projects in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Now those investments won’t blossom into Biden’s legacy. They’ll become the seeds for growth for Trump’s economy.
Biden’s presidency, from his legislative record to his leadership abroad and management of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, deserves more credit than it will receive. He signed consequential legislation into law: gun reforms, an updated Electoral Count Act, the codification of same sex marriage, a long-sought bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the PACT act for veterans’ health care, and the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration entered into the first ever negotiations for price reductions on prescription drugs between Medicare and the pharmaceutical industry.
He worked tirelessly on intractable conflicts overseas—scrambling for months to get a ceasefire in Gaza and to provide Ukraine with weapons and resources in its war with Russia.
Watching what Trump does now on all these fronts will break Biden’s heart.
So too will his forthcoming absence from the party. As Democrats try to rebuild and fend off whatever damage to democracy comes with Trump’s next term, they won’t turn to Biden. When he retires from public life, stepping off a stage he has stood upon proudly since 1972, Biden won’t have the beloved party elder status he worked for more than fifty years to earn.
Instead, he will be exiled.
In 1988, days before Biden had to end his first presidential campaign amid accusations of plagiarism and exaggeration, the then 44-year-old senator said: “I’ve done some dumb things. And I’ll do some dumb things again.”
His aides, in the last week, have continued to note that Biden, a week from turning 82, is the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump, and that they believe he could have done so again.
This is ludicrous. It was Biden’s hubris that devastated his party. He doesn’t need to do another dumb thing.
The complicated truth is that we owe Biden, a good man, our gratitude for so much he has done. But we also owe him the truth: He screwed up badly and hurt his legacy in the process.
As Biden would say, God love him.