Joe Biden’s long-term legacy merely a hill of beans compared to this unprecedented turmoil

US President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month sealed his political fate.

Joe Biden’s belated abdication throws American politics into acute uncertainty and flux. Everything is up for grabs.

Despite Donald Trump’s commanding position in the polls and broad national dominance at the moment, don’t think this presidential election is already decided.

Biden’s action is cinematic in its drama. By coincidence, this week I watched Casablanca, one more time, on a plane journey. It’s the greatest love story ever made into a movie. In it, Humphrey Bogart, the hero who begins the film lost in a pointless life of cynicism and self-pity, not only achieves the heroic, but becomes a whole person, and the greatest screen lover ever, not by winning Ingrid Bergman, but by a perfect act of renunciation.

That’s why the movie has always been so powerful. Bogart wins the undying esteem of Ingrid Bergman, and of movie audiences always, when he pushes her away, for her own good and the greater good of the anti-Nazi cause in World War II.

Admittedly, it’s more than a bit of a stretch to cast Biden as a latter-day Bogart.

Still less does the Democratic Party, for all its fabled virtues, call to mind the loveliness of the Swedish actor playing opposite Bogart.

And of course Biden’s own somewhat unheroic concession to plain reality came 18 months too late to be really heroic. Now his party must act at lightning speed, in something near to panic, to choose its best candidate, and her – it’s most likely to be her – running mate.

Biden was always, in truth, one of America’s weirdest presidents. As a politician, he looked normal only in comparison with Donald Trump, which is why America elected him four years ago.

His oddity comes about from the sheer, unrelenting intensity of his desire for high office, and the effectiveness, until now, of his singular virtue of persistence. This is hardly unknown in leading politicians. But in Biden it was a kind of grand mal folly.

President Joe Biden before going into isolation for Covid-19. Picture: AFP

Biden’s political life was not defined by a coherent, even semi-coherent, set of ideas, as was the case, say, with Ronald Reagan once he reached political maturity.

Even Trump has a few core convictions – protectionism, sovereign control of borders, assertive nationalism.

Nor was Biden’s political life marked by a profound conversion from one ideological position to another. He just generally slid along behind the consensus, wherever it went, anti-abortion then pro-abortion, anti-bussing then pro-bussing, free trade then protectionist, and so on.

Biden was the epitome, the Platonic ideal, of the jobbing politician who learned the talking points and chased the zeitgeist.

He was once a promising young senator and modestly conservative as Democrats go. A tribal Catholic, he was anti-abortion. He was also anti-bussing to achieve school integration. He took a great interest in foreign affairs.

But Robert Gates, who served as defence secretary for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, observed in his memoirs that while Biden was a decent and even generous person privately, he had, in Gates’s view, got every single major strategic decision wrong across his decades of involvement in national security.

Biden, recall, was the only senior member of Obama’s team who was against sending the Navy Seal team to kill the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Biden was a repeat candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but until 2020 he had never won a single primary.

When Obama secured the Democratic nomination in 2008, the first black politician to become a presidential candidate for a major party, he needed a running mate who would be reassuring.

Hillary Clinton, who gave Obama a solid run for his money in the primary, had exposed a certain weakness in Obama’s candidacy among white working-class voters.

So Obama chose senator Joe Biden. Biden had always been garrulous. When one interlocutor reminded him of the quip that all politics was local, Biden responded that all politics was personal.

Gates’s memoirs also recall that even in Biden’s vice-presidential days he would sometimes gabble on at extraordinary length at National Security Council meetings. Occasionally his anecdotes became so long-winded that he seemed to lose his train of thought. Obama would gently shut him down.

When Obama’s term ended, he encouraged Hillary Clinton to run for the presidency, and it was thought that had Biden run, even as the incumbent vice-president, he could well come third in the primaries behind Clinton and the left-wing Bernie Sanders. It’s also true that during this period Biden’s life was overshadowed by the recent tragedy of his son Beau’s death.

So how did Biden win such a handsome victory in the 2020 presidential election? In the early primaries, the most likely looking winners were Pete Buttigieg and Sanders. I thought Buttigieg pretty impressive and in many ways he was hard done by in the primaries.

But the Democratic Party establishment decided that Sanders, because he was so left wing, would almost certainly lose to Trump. They also thought Buttigieg wouldn’t win.

Perhaps they thought the US was not yet ready to elect a gay president.

In any event, they coalesced comprehensively behind Biden. It was less a political choice than a generational one.

Old white guys, Trump’s core constituency, could relate to Biden, even to his gaffes. Neither Sanders nor Buttigieg had a big following among African-Americans. These voters delivered the critical primary victories to Biden.

Then Covid struck and this was an absolute blessing for Biden’s political fortunes. I think a Sanders presidency would have been absurd, but he might well have beaten Biden in the primaries if the contest had gone on in the normal way.

The Democratic establishment decided Biden was the least threatening candidate they could run. They wanted to make the election a referendum on Trump.

Frankly, by 2020 Biden was already way past his prime. He got much worse subsequently, but even then Biden’s sentences were exercises in hope at the outset and experiences of acute peril in delivery.

Some Australians who observed Biden on his late vice-presidential visit thought him garrulous, unfocused and not entirely serious.

But Covid meant Biden could campaign primarily from his basement.

The campaign was carefully and effectively managed by the Democrat machine. Trump made a series of disastrous strategic errors. He campaigned almost entirely on his own personality and on the basis that he’d been mistreated personally by the deep state while in office.

Biden was sold as a centrist but at no point has he resisted the disastrous leftward drift of his party. Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leaders of the Democratic Party left, had opposed Biden in the 2020 primaries but they stuck with him this time right to the end. They couldn’t believe they’d get a president more left than Biden had proven to be in office.

By the end, the Trump campaign desperately wanted Biden to stay in the race. They didn’t run any ads arising from Biden’s disastrous debate performance. With Biden gone, Trump’s age, 78, becomes a negative.

Of course, if Biden is unfit to run in November, he’s really unfit to be president today.

All the media who claimed criticism of him on these grounds was fake news or a right-wing conspiracy should hang their heads in shame.

Biden was basically bludgeoned into doing the right thing. Not quite Bogie. He was lucky his party forced his hand. So is America.