It may be said of Joe Biden that nothing in his long political career became him like the leaving it. It has been more than six weeks now since November 5, that Bonfire Night of Democratic hopes and dreams. There are still five more weeks to go to the end of his term of office, and the President of the United States, the most powerful man on Earth, has essentially disappeared.
Outgoing presidents are usually keener than ever to put on a display of hyperactivity in that long transition period between the election and the inauguration of their successor. They know they have 75 days or so to shape final impressions of their presidency, to deepen the foundations for a legacy. So they give reflective speeches on what they’ve learnt; they issue impassioned defences of their time in the White House; they rush to cap off some symbolic outstanding business. They begin, in other words, that critical process of converting themselves from partisan competitor in the crowded arena of the here and now into a worthy occupant of a more serene place in the pantheon of American history.
But Biden has left the building. He made a brief pre-planned trip to Africa in which the most memorable moment was when he appeared to fall asleep during a roundtable with local leaders. He attended another international meeting in Brazil in which at one point he seemed to wander off into the rainforest. Aides insist he is working on trying to secure a peace in the Middle East and in Ukraine but there’s not much evidence for that.
Instead he has left the stage to Donald Trump, a man who hardly needs an invitation to step into the limelight. The former and future president has been meeting foreign leaders at home and abroad; issuing proclamations on policy present and future. This week it has been he, not Biden, engaging in the messy process of getting Congress to pass bills to keep the government funded.
There is one important thing Biden has done. He issued, after repeatedly insisting he wouldn’t, a presidential pardon to his son, Hunter, freeing him of any accountability for any crime – not only the crimes for which he has been indicted and convicted but any he may have committed any time in the past 11 years. In that one act of symbolism and substance, we learnt again what kind of politician Biden is. It was a grubby, self-serving, mendacious end to a long career in which grubby, self-serving mendacity has been one of the hallmarks – along with an almost unerring tendency to be wrong on all the most important issues that have faced the country in that time.
History will not be kind to Biden, whoever writes it. To the left, he will forever be the man who, through his selfish insistence on running again in the face of his own cognitive collapse, precluded the Democratic Party from having a real contest to find a successor and allowed Trump back into the White House. To the right, he will be the man who won a narrow majority for the Democratic Party in a contentious 2020 election and chose, stubbornly and destructively, to interpret it as a mandate for a radical lurch to the left in the country’s political culture.
To everyone else he will simply become another member of that short and infamous roll call of presidential futility: one-term presidents, most of whose names live on only in obscurity or obloquy: Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter.
That Biden’s presidency has ended in failure should come as no surprise. It is the near-inevitable outcome of a lifetime in politics in which his defining objective was simply to be, not to do; to participate, not to lead; to achieve by simply surviving, not surviving in order to achieve.
Before that simple survival was recognised by his becoming Barack Obama’s running-mate, he spent nearly 40 years in the Senate, a feat of longevity matched only by its pointlessness. It’s almost impossible to spend that amount of time in the upper chamber of Congress and not leave some mark, have your name attached to some major piece of legislation, some diplomatic initiative or policy innovation. But just about the only thing with the Delaware senator’s name attached to it is the Joseph R Biden Jr railroad station in Wilmington.
The reason is that the entire career of this man, whose partisan loyalty far outstripped his native wit, has been a dogged determination to find the centre of gravity of his beloved Democratic Party and cling to it.
When the left was ascendant in the 1980s, bashing Ronald Reagan as a heartless warmonger, Biden was right there as one of the bashers-in-chief. When the party realised it had forfeited the mainstream and turned instead towards the centre under Bill Clinton, Biden was there, championing welfare reform and balanced budgets as a newly fledged moderate. When the party fell into line behind George W. Bush’s war on terrorism in the early 2000s, Biden was there, enthusiastically endorsing the disastrous invasion of Iraq while a few genuine leaders opposed it.
Having twice tried and failed to be president, he suddenly found himself in 2020, like the last survivor of a lost tribe, as his party’s only vaguely plausible figure in a field of implausible alternatives. And once in office, he honoured that success by immediately embracing the very implausibilities he had been selected to avoid: the economic agenda of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic left, and the cultural and social agenda of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Black Lives Matter. And all the time it was evident he barely knew where he was.
He wanted to be remembered as the man who thwarted Donald Trump. Instead he will go down in history as the man who empowered him.
The Times
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