Joe Biden began his national political career in 1972, improbably ousting a Republican senator in Delaware at the age of 29. Biden was so young that he was elected before he was old enough, per the Constitution, to serve in the Senate. He turned 30 on Nov. 20 of that year, enabling him to take the seat in early 1973.
He ended his career Sunday some 52 years later as the oldest president in U.S. history, a man forced to step aside from a reelection campaign less than four months before voters go to the polls by leaders in his own party who determined his elderly state made him unelectable. The weekend timing might have been a surprise but the exit was inevitable.
Simply put, Biden had lost the support of the vast majority of his party and, crucially, also those who burnish its coffers.
Both William Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks excelled at writing tragedies, and the story of Joe Biden is one squarely in a tradition reaching back thousands of years. The brash upstart becomes the hubristic old lion who doesn’t realize when his time is up and is forced under the white-hot spotlight to suffer a humiliating end to his story of public life. He became part an Oedipus and part a King Lear, howling with rage at a perceived injustice actually born of his own mortality.
So what to make of America’s 46th president now that his ill-considered initial choice to run has left his party in a chaotic shambles as it again faces an ascendent Donald Trump, a presidential candidate Democrats both fear and detest?
In many respects, this spectacular miscalculation reflects the Joe Biden that Americans of a certain age have long known.
He’s a man who has repeatedly made mistakes — bad ones at times — and has made many other poor decisions.
His first run for the presidency in 1988 crumbled after the emergence of credible plagiarism allegations in a speech he gave. His leadership as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman of Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in which he gave short shrift to the sexual-harassment allegations of Anita Hill, a former aide to Thomas, was a notable blemish on his record for which he later apologized. He voted against President George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraq in 1991 and in favor of President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq in 2002. With the benefit of hindsight, most would say those votes should have been reversed.
In short, while Biden has been a man gifted with the political appeal of relatability for the working-class voters who often decide presidential elections, he hasn’t always been a great decision-maker.
So it was in April 2023 when Biden announced he would run for reelection. Even at the time, there were misgivings about his age. Those grew rapidly. By late last year, polls showed age to be an acute Biden vulnerability. And the evidence of his decline, to the extent Americans were permitted to glimpse it given the White House’s obvious efforts to shield Biden from embarrassing “senior moments,” was there for all to see.
The party — and, let’s be honest, some partisans in the media — reproached Americans for questioning Biden’s stamina and clear diminishment. Biden soldiered on, confident in his belief that the election would turn on Americans’ desire not to relive the chaotic Trump era rather than his record and, more importantly, his clear ability to do the job for another four years.
He was wrong, as we all now know. It was most consequential blunder of his career.
As Democrats move on to determine who their presidential standard-bearer now will be under the tightest of deadlines, Biden’s overall legacy will continue to be debated. Time may be kinder than most Democrats feel in a moment when Biden did not make it easy for his party.
There have been many bright spots, of course. His single term was a welcome return to a presidency in which Americans didn’t have to think virtually every day about what the occupant was doing or saying. He worked hard — and ultimately successfully — to ensure continued U.S. support for Ukraine in its existential battle with Russia. And, to his credit, he stood by his long-held principles when it came to supporting Israel, if not always its current administration.
Biden also points, with justification, to a decent economic record, marked by substantial job growth and a bullish stock market. The rough post-pandemic inflationary pressures soured Americans on their economic fortunes, and Biden could do little to tame them or convince the public things were better than polls reflected. He wasn’t the first president to be burned by inflation, and he won’t be the last.
As vice president, Biden was an able and wise counselor to Barack Obama and an indispensable administration emissary to his former colleagues on Capitol Hill. That the veteran senator who’d first taken office when Obama was just 11 would agree to play second fiddle to the nation’s first Black president is not forgotten by Black voters, who’ve emerged as perhaps Biden’s final firewall of support since he shockingly flubbed his debate with Trump more than three weeks ago.
There’s no small amount of irony, then, that it was Obama who helped dissuade Biden from running to succeed him in 2016, choosing instead to support Hillary Clinton. Democrats ever since, including Biden, have wondered whether the country would have been spared Trump in the first place had Obama chosen otherwise. It’s quite possibly the case.
Biden’s life story is one of uncommon resilience.
He famously almost quit his newly won Senate seat after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash but ultimately carried on, commuting back and forwards via train from the capital to Wilmington, Del., so he could tend to his two sons who survived the crash.
As in those timeless tragedies, though, Biden’s belief that the only response to setbacks and losses was to “get back up,” in his words, failed him in the end.
Alas, there’s no prevailing over the ravages of age, which arrive at different moments for different people and do so without regard to deserving.
Grit and toughness no longer are enough at some point toward the end. The trick is knowing when to leave the stage. And having the courage to know that the right moment is probably one when you still feel far from done in your own head.
The compensation for our physical and cognitive declines as we get older is the wisdom gleaned from all those years.
Biden thought that experience could beat Trumpism and cheat Father Time. As he exits the political ring, both of those mythologies still are standing.