Joe Biden’s sombre address to the nation was dignified and at times painful to watch as the 81-year-old repeatedly stumbled over his words, reminding everyone why he was giving the speech in the first place.
And yet for all the soaring rhetoric about saving democracy and selflessness, it was not a truly honest speech. Biden never told Americans the simple truth: “I’m sorry but I realised far too late that I was too old to serve another four years and I’m sorry for now making it harder than it otherwise would have been for my successor to win the election.”
Instead he insisted that his record “merited a second term” but the “best way to unite our nation” was to “pass the torch to a new generation’’ regardless of “personal ambition”.
He didn’t actually explain why any of this upheaval was necessary.
It begs the question as to whether the President really understands that he is too old, or does he privately blame his party for engineering a coup against him unnecessarily?
Either way the speech marked the first draft of history for Biden as he seeks to sell his legacy as a one-term president.
It must have been a difficult speech to give for a proud man like Biden, who has been a hugely consequential figure in American politics for half a century.
After the drama of the past week, the President now finds himself in no-man’s land.
He is a very lame-duck president and while he pledges to be focused on “doing my job” for the final six months of his presidency, there is nothing he can do legislatively in that time because Democrats don’t control the House of Representatives.
The best impact a lame-duck president can have is usually on foreign policy, which is why Biden gave an ambitious shopping list of ending the war in Gaza, keeping Russia in check in Ukraine and holding China to account in the Pacific.
He will now face the surreal experience of running the country from the White House in relative obscurity while all media attention will be on Vice-President Kamala Harris as she crisscrosses the country trying to defeat Donald Trump.
Two days ago, Biden said he was “going to be out there on the campaign with her”, but there was no mention of this in his Oval Office address. It is far from certain that Harris wants Biden to campaign for her, given that her campaign is a “vision for the future” rather than the past.
Biden’s messy abandonment of the race threatens, at least in the short term, to overshadow the more positive parts of his legacy.
His central problem as president was not a lack of achievements but rather an almost complete inability to sell these to the electorate.
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, believes history will treat Biden kinder than voters had, not just because of his legislative achievements but because he defeated Trump.
.@realDonaldTrump watches President Biden’s address to the Nation, from his plane following a rally in Charlotte, NC. pic.twitter.com/ohDhsqtVqC
— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) July 25, 2024
In Biden’s first two years as president, he passed consequential legislation for which he had received an electorate mandate, including $US1.9 trillion stimulus package to provide economic relief for the Covid pandemic, a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump tried but failed to achieve in his first term, and significant climate change initiatives, including rejoining the Paris Agreement.
Internationally, Biden handled the two major crises of his term – the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war with overall competence, strongly backing US aid to Ukraine against those Republicans who wanted to abandon it, and supporting Israel fundamentally, though not uncritically, in its battle to destroy Hamas.
Although his withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan was chaotic, it was the right strategic decision for the US to get out of that forever war.
Yet his mistakes always seemed to outshine his achievements with the electorate. His first stimulus package, although popular with the electorate, served to fuel the inflation of cost-of-living pressures, which did more than anything else to ultimately destroy his popularity with voters.
Biden also made a historic misjudgment at the US-Mexican border when he reversed some of the hardline measures from the Trump administration, leading to more than 10 million unauthorised immigrants crossing the border.
A vital and coherent president would have been able to sell this mixed record better than Biden, but he was singularly incapable of doing so.
If Harris loses to Trump, Biden will inevitably share the blame for effectively conscripting her with just over three months to go before the election.
It will be a difficult six months for the President as he continues a lonely last lap as the leader of the free world while all eyes are on the Harris-Trump battle.
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