Few Democrats will ever forget the night of June 27, 2024, when all of the careful mitigation, obfuscation and mendacity long practiced by loyal aides and close family members met the cruel reality of a debate stage with a hostile opponent and a president finally forced to speak for himself, without a teleprompter.
In a matter of minutes, the extent of a president’s mental decline was writ large and Joe Biden’s campaign for a second term blew up in the Democrats’ face, meaning they lost control of a narrative that inexorably led to the reelection of their nemesis, Donald J. Trump. Kamala Harris was neither a great candidate nor one who ran a stellar campaign, but the narrative sweep of future historians surely will foreground that debate.
The best of them will begin even further back: Biden’s hubristic decision not to declare himself a one-term president from the start and thus pre-empt his own King Lear-like inclinations. Had he done so, he might have been remembered as a post-Trump unifier, a figure future Democrats would have seen as a John the Baptist preparing the way for the next generation of party leadership.
His presidential legacy, now one of not knowing when to leave the stage, would have been remembered as a time of unselfish service to the country, the reinvention of a once-prosaic politician, an Amtrak Joe, who fought back his own stuttering insecurity and arrived at a place where he knew himself and his limitations. He would also have been highly influential in his choice of successor and carried on for years as an éminence grise while also making bank. That might not have helped Hunter Biden as much as the controversial presidential pardon he received from his father, but it would have been useful.
Timing one’s necessary exit from power is, of course, one of life’s most vexing conundrums and Biden hardly is alone in blowing the moment. Biden had a 43-year career sweep, beginning in 1972 when he became one of the youngest people ever elected to the U.S. Senate and ending as an 82-year-old president. Inarguably, neither his presidency nor his total service to the American people should be defined exclusively as an old man allowing personal objectives and defensiveness to overtake everything. In the end, we came to know that the last-minute flurry of executive actions were unlikely to be coming from the man himself but rather from staffers trying to shove through their favored stuff at the eleventh hour. But it’s reasonable to assume that was not the case until the latter part of his term.
Overall, there were palpable achievements, not a few of which involved reminding Americans of the importance of core structural values as the maverick extremes of political discourse exploded in their influence. “I know that believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society,” Biden said in his Wednesday farewell address. “Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances — it may not be perfect but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years.” Indeed it has. And Biden was right to affirm its importance.
Biden, at some political cost, did not let Israel down, standing firmly at its side following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. He did the same for the people of Ukraine, rallying to their support (even showing up) against Vladimir Putin’s unctuous 2022 invasion. Those twin acts of unequivocal support were taken too much for granted in their moments. But they were pivotal when it came to preventing the long-term influence of acts of inhumane aggression and anarchic global change. Together, they are perhaps Biden’s most important overall achievements.
Domestically, he also led the nation out of the COVID crisis in a way that ensured most people and businesses were not felled by a virus over which they had no control.
Diligent Americans who compare the balance in their retirement accounts as Biden leaves office to what was there when he took his oath as president are likely to like what they see. He presided over a boom in employment, albeit inflationary. And while some of his actions overreached, he also tempered some of the ways the American free market exploits its most vulnerable citizens and showed a level of governmental compassion. Compensation for ordinary Americans increased, weaselly corporate practices were scrutinized, and inroads were made when it came to the nation’s glaring disparities of income and resources.
Biden also was an effective steward of the natural environment and he made a virtuous effort toward renewing America’s notoriously neglected infrastructure, the world of roads, bridges, tunnels and rails that had been allowed to decay to a degree that would be laughable in Europe or even China. That work hardly is done, but real progress was made over the last four years.
The end to U.S. involvement in the long war in Afghanistan was bungled by Biden in such a way as to obscure the need for it to be over. He was not willing to take on illegal immigration, an issue on which Democrats sharply are divided, in any meaningful way. His administration failed to anticipate the pernicious impact of inflation as corporations took advantage of the cover to raise prices on ordinary folks and too much federal money sloshed around local governments, who set about ensuring they spent every penny of Biden’s largesse, whatever the value of the local project.
Biden failed to see how hard it would be for state and local pols to wean themselves, once the spigot dried up. And, of course, he failed to see how much the price of eggs mattered at the ballot box, being as those most likely to vote are also the most likely to understand the decline in purchasing power of their savings.
Biden also leaves a sorry legacy when it comes to the nation’s fiscal health, producing an ungodly $1.8 trillion deficit in his last full year during a time of peace and economic growth. We expect when the debt reckoning comes in this country, Biden won’t be remembered fondly.
Then there’s Biden’s pardon of his problematic son, Hunter. It was not just an act of parental love but unapologetically transactional, meaning that Biden lost the high road on which he had long sought to travel so as to make an effective contrast between himself (and his party) and the president who both preceded him and will take over again, his voluminous bloviating making the Biden administration look like a slim volume squeezed out by two doorstoppers.
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