WASHINGTON – Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an excited President Joe Biden described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.
The United States faced a life-altering pandemic. There has been a shocking burst of inflation and now a global conflict with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the persistent threat to democracy he felt donald trump posed.
How could Biden heal this collective trauma?
“Be confident,” he said emphatically in one interview with the Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”
But over the next two years, the the trust Biden hoped to instill has steadily diminished. When the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate against Trump in Junehe lost the benefit of the doubt and on Sunday withdrew his party’s nomination.
In the aftermath of the debate, Democrats, who had been united in their determination to avoid another Trump term, suddenly fractured, and Republicans, wracked by chaos in Congress and the former president’s criminal conviction, improbably united. in a challenging unit.
Biden never figured out how to inspire the most powerful country in the world to believe in itself, let alone him.
He lost the trust of supporters in the 90-minute debate with Trump, even though pride initially led him to overcome the fears of lawmakers, party leaders and donors who urged him to drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, as if on cue, pumped his fist in the air. Biden, while campaigning in Las Vegas, tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday and retreated to his Delaware beach house to recover.
The events of the last three weeks led to an exit that Biden never wanted, but Democrats felt it was essential to maximize their chances of victory in November.
Biden appears to have misread the breadth of his support. While many Democrats had deep personal admiration for the president, they did not have the same affection for him politically.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, said Biden arrived as a reprieve for a nation exhausted by Trump and the pandemic.
“He was a perfect person for that moment,” Brinkley said, noting that Biden proved, in an era of polarization, that bipartisan legislation was still possible. However, voters saw him as a placeholder, and he could never transcend the text of his speeches to “visually embody the spirit of the nation with a sense of enthusiasm, energy and optimism”.
As his re-election campaign entered its final days, Biden was still trying to prove his worth and rally voters around fears that Trump would doom American democracy.
There has never been a “Joe Biden Democrat” like there has been a “Reagan Republican.” He didn’t have adoring movement-style followers like Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy had. He was not a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only dimension that broke barriers in his election was the fact that he was the oldest person ever elected president.
Although he repeatedly considered being in the Oval Office as a senator from Delaware, voters repeatedly rejected him.
His first run for the White House, in the 1988 cycle, ended with self-inflicted wounds resulting from plagiarism, and he did not make it to his first nominating contest. When he ran in 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he received less than 1% of the vote. In 2016, Obama advised him not to run, despite being Obama’s vice president. A Biden victory in 2020 seemed implausible when he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before a dramatic comeback in South Carolina.
He won the nomination and then did something rare in American politics: He defeated an incumbent president, Trump, who had been a catalyst for a seething sense of polarization. He then had to withstand the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters who falsely claimed the 2020 election had been stolen.
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said history would treat Biden more kindly than voters, not just because of his legislative achievements but because he defeated Trump.
“His legacy is significant beyond all of his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who stepped up and defeated a president who put himself above our democracy.
“That, in itself, is a historic achievement.”
But Biden couldn’t overcome his age. And when he showed weakness in his steps and in his speech, there was no base of supporters who could support him. It was a humiliating end to a half-century career in politics, but it hardly reflected the full legacy of his time in the White House.
His record includes legislation that will rebuild the country in a way that will likely be seen over the next dozen years, even if voters don’t immediately appreciate it.
“It takes time for that to happen,” Biden told BET News on Tuesday. But in that same interview, he also demonstrated why the calls for him to step aside became so much louder: he couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, referring to him as the “black man.” .
These recent episodes stand in stark contrast to a list of accomplishments that most presidents would envy and use as a solid basis for re-election. The optimism about the country’s future that Biden says drove him could materialize after his departure from the national scene.
Harvard University economist Jason Furman, a top adviser during the Obama administration, said Biden “took office when the economy was at the height of COVID and helped oversee the transition to an economy that is now growing faster than any of its countries.” similar economies, with less inflation than they have.”
Furman noted that Biden has increased spending to make long-term investments in the economy, while also retaining Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve, giving the Fed cover to raise rates and reduce inflation without disrupting the job market.
In March 2021, Biden released $1.9 billion in pandemic aid, creating a series of new programs that temporarily halved child poverty, halted evictions and contributed to the creation of 15.7 million jobs. But inflation began to rise shortly afterwards. Biden’s approval rating as measured by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research fell from 61% to 39% in June.
This was followed by a series of executive actions to streamline global supply chains and a bipartisan $1 billion infrastructure package that not only replaced aging infrastructure but also improved internet access and prepared communities to resist to climate change.
But the infrastructure bill also revealed the challenge Biden faced in getting the public to recognize his achievement, because many of the projects will take decades to complete.
In 2022, Biden and his Democratic colleagues pressed ahead with two measures that reinvigorated the future of manufacturing in the US.
The CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion to build factories and create institutions to manufacture computer chips domestically, ensuring that the U.S. would have access to the most advanced semiconductors needed to drive economic growth and maintain national security. There was also the Reducing Inflation Act, which provided incentives to abandon fossil fuels and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Biden has also sought to compete more aggressively with China and rebuild alliances like NATO. He completed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, an effort that was widely criticized. The president has also faced criticism over his handling of the southern border with Mexico, as illegal border crossings have led to concerns over his handling of immigration.
He also found himself embroiled in a series of global conflicts that exposed even more internal divisions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 worsened inflation as Trump and other Republicans questioned the value of military aid to Ukrainians. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, triggered a war that showed divisions within the Democratic Party over whether the United States should continue to support Israel, while tens of thousands of Palestinians died in months of counterattacks.
Biden gave private talks to aides so that they would not focus on differences when listening to the public, but on seeking agreement. He followed the ideal of bipartisanship even when Democrats broke with the Republican Party.
And yet, just days before dropping out of the race, Biden felt his work was not done and his legacy incomplete.
“I have to finish this job,” he told reporters after a NATO summit.
But the size of the risks and the fear of a Biden defeat resulted in Democrats betting that the tasks he began could be better completed by a younger generation.
“History will be kinder to him than voters in the end,” Axelrod said.
