Biden’s legacy across a half-century political career

Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, US President Joe Biden passionately described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized country.

The United States had endured a life-changing pandemic, a shocking wave of inflation, and now a global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, and the ongoing threat to democracy that Donald Trump saw as his own.

How could Biden heal that collective trauma?

“Be confident,” he said emphatically in an interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”

But over the next two years, the confidence Biden hoped to inspire steadily eroded. When the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate against Trump in June, he lost the benefit of the doubt and withdrew as his party’s nominee today.

Multiple times for the top job

Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, said Biden was a reprieve for a country exhausted by Trump and the pandemic.

“He was a perfect person for that moment,” Brinkley said. Yet voters saw him as a temporary replacement.

As his re-election campaign entered its final days, Biden was still trying to prove himself and mobilize voters around fears that Trump would destroy American democracy.

The only barrier-breaking dimension of his election was the fact that he became the oldest person ever elected president. While he repeatedly considered standing in the Oval Office from his position as a senator from Delaware, voters rejected him again and again.

His first race for the White House, in the 1988 cycle, ended in self-inflicted wounds from plagiarism, and he failed to make it to the primary nomination fight. When he ran in 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he won less than 1% of the vote.

How will history judge Biden?

In 2016, Obama advised him not to run, even though he was Obama’s vice president. A Biden victory in 2020 looked unlikely when he came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before making a dramatic comeback in South Carolina.

He won the nomination and then did something rare in American politics: he defeated incumbent President Trump, a catalyst for a turbulent sense of polarization.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said history would treat Biden more kindly than voters did, not only because of his legislative record but also because he defeated Trump.

“His legacy is more meaningful than any of his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who stood up and defeated a president who put himself above our democracy.

“That alone is a historic achievement.”

A race against time

But Biden could not overcome his age. And when he showed weakness in his steps and his speeches, there was no base of supporters to support him.

It was a humbling end to a half-century career in politics, but it also didn’t really reflect 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 not be visible for another 12 years, even if voters may not immediately appreciate it.

“It takes time for it to happen,” Biden told BET News last week.

But in that same interview he also showed why the calls for his resignation had become so loud: he could no longer remember the name of his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. He called him “the black man.”

These recent events stand in stark contrast to the list of accomplishments that most presidents would envy and use as a solid foundation for re-election.

The optimism about the country’s future that Biden said drove him could become a reality after he leaves the national stage.

Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and one of his top advisers during the Obama administration, said Biden “came into office as the economy was in the grip of Covid and helped oversee the transition to an economy that is now growing faster than any comparable economy, with less inflation than the others.”

He completed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of 13 American service members, an effort that was widely criticized. He also became embroiled in a series of global conflicts that further exposed domestic divisions.

Biden gave private lessons to his aides in not focusing on differences when listening to the public, but on seeking common ground. He stuck to the ideal of bipartisanship even as Democrats broke with the GOP.

“History will be kinder to him than the voters were at the end,” Axelrod said.