President Joe Biden bids farewell to his party Monday night. And whatever he says, he will get a rousing reception for one simple and deeply unusual reason: He’s no longer Democrats’ standard-bearer, and they are relieved he saw the political writing on the wall and passed the baton to someone who might have a better chance to defeat former President Donald Trump.
Despite the cheers, let’s not pretend this isn’t an awkward and bittersweet moment for Biden. I’ve spent my entire professional life (over 30 years now) tracking, reporting on and watching Biden find a path to the Oval Office. I saw him try and fail … a lot. It was clearly his Holy Grail. No matter how many ways his ambition for the presidency went sideways, he always wanted to come back and try again.
And despite all the failures, his candidacies always were compelling. He was always a candidate worth gravitating toward for many reporters for one simple reason: He told you everything he was thinking, even stuff you’d never expect him to say. Before Trump showed up and completely transformed the world of political etiquette and rhetoric, Biden was seen as unfiltered in a mostly net-positive way.
There’s a reason no other Democrat has appeared on “Meet the Press” more than Joe Biden, and it’s not just his longevity in politics — he was a guest worth booking since he might actually express his actual thoughts, rather than come armed with just predictable talking points.
There’s no greater example of this than his appearance in 2012, when he leaned forward on same-sex marriage before his running mate, the sitting president, was ready to do the same.
One thing my predecessors and I learned interviewing Biden over the years is that he took every question he was asked seriously (even the dumb ones) and wanted to impress his interlocutors by also trying to answer whatever subtext was being implied. He loves being a political insider as much as he loves being a campaigner. In short, he loves the game. He loves to know who’s up, who’s down and who’s coming. Talking with Biden off the record was like talking with a fellow political reporter — he was that informed about what was happening.
Frankly, that Joe Biden has been missing for nearly six years. And it’s why many of us reporters — before many elected Democrats went public — were among the first to question whether he was up for another four years. He wasn’t behaving like the Biden we had all covered for decades.
To this day, I’m not sure what the truth is about Biden and the hermetically sealed bubble his staff created for him. What clearly started as a necessary concern over Covid became a crutch to keep Biden from being Biden. Maybe staffers knew something we didn’t, or maybe they just didn’t know or appreciate his best attribute.
Biden built a reservoir of goodwill with many political professionals over the years because he said what he meant and meant what he said. It’s perhaps why there were plenty of public defenders of his lackluster public appearances for parts of his presidency, because those people were still remembering the Biden with whom they used to interact.
It’s why there was also a lot of head-scratching about the White House staff’s apparent overprotection of Biden, because it appeared to be knee-capping the president’s best attribute: his affability.
In politics, that’s an attribute in very short supply. The staff appeared to be more concerned about the unfiltered part of Biden’s reputation, especially because as he aged, the filter worked even less.
But that concern took away his connection with the public. The detachment only reinforced the charge that Biden wasn’t up to the job. And maybe that’s the real answer.
Ultimately, when Biden stews about being pushed aside, he will have to look in the mirror and ask whether he was honest with himself about his ability to run for another term as president — or whether his family and his staff hurt him more under the guise of trying to protect him. Either he was up to the task and his staff never gave him a chance to prove it, or he wasn’t up to the job and his staff wasn’t honest with him.
Here’s a known unknown: Had Biden interacted more with the public and the media more frequently, would that have gotten the country, the party and the media used to “Grandpa Joe”? By overprotecting him and limiting his unscripted public moments, did the White House team end up raising the stakes for the few moments he did participate in, culminating in a disastrous debate performance? A president who had spent more time dealing with unscripted moments might have been in better shape on debate night even while feeling ill. But that’s not the reality.
The reality is this: Joe Biden is going to be a one-term president, and history judges one-term presidents quite harshly. With the possible exception of those historians who pine for the days of James Polk, who kept to a one-term pledge, every other one-term president in our republic’s history became a one-termer because of a harsh verdict from either voters or party leaders.
A lot of folks besides the first family are trying to shape Biden’s place in history. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went so far as to suggest Biden might belong on Mount Rushmore. It’s hard to take her suggestion seriously, of course — it strikes me as a party leader’s trying to appease an old friend who she knows is angry over the role she played leading the charge to get him out of the race.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Biden was the best president of his lifetime. Walz is 60, born in 1964, less than six months into Lyndon Johnson’s term in office. How many Americans would rank Biden ahead of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama?
The point is that the Democratic Party is awash in hyperbole regarding Biden as the party lays out emotional padding for a soft landing justifying his unusual exit. Whether true or not, on a human level, it’s the right thing to do. Nobody wants to see their life’s work (and Biden spent nearly his entire adult life trying to get to the presidency) just tossed away in history’s dustbin.
It is also fascinating that so many Democrats believe they need to publicly express over-the-top affection for Biden that seems to rival some of the over-the-top rhetoric elected Republicans have used to describe Trump’s one term.
Biden is going to be a one-term president because the public lost confidence in him, period. Some people may have liked him and wanted the Biden from the Obama years but lost confidence in this version of Biden’s being able to the job. Others may have lost confidence in him because they thought he was guided too much by the progressive left. Still others may have lost confidence in him simply because he didn’t successfully put Trump in the ash heap of history. Despite his victory in 2020, Biden’s presidency wasn’t successful enough to make the GOP decide to move on from Trump.
Perhaps expectations that Biden would be able to get the country to turn the page on Trump were too great — though Biden did feed those expectations himself. But it does mean the country’s expectations weren’t met.
The long-term question for Biden’s legacy is whether there’s anything he did that any Democratic president wouldn’t have done. Is there anything he accomplished that was unique to Biden?
Unlike Clinton or Obama, Joe Biden wasn’t a president who tried to move the party in a particular direction — beyond forward, from Trump and the coronavirus pandemic alike. Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right, especially on security issues (both foreign and domestic), as well as on fiscal issues. Before Clinton, Democrats won the popular vote only three times in 40 years: 1960, 1964 and 1976. Since Clinton, Democrats have won the popular vote all but once (2004).
As for Obama, he helped move the mainstream of the Democratic Party from center-left to simply left. Basically, he helped redefine the country from being “center-right” to being simply “center.” Since Obama, the number of people comfortable identifying as liberal has consistently gone up.
Biden split the difference between his two Democratic predecessors, which inside the Democratic Party (and in the age of Trump) was the safe thing to do. He minimized intraparty rifts, and that, as a party leader, might be the most positive part of his legacy. If there’s one consistent criticism of both Clinton and Obama, it’s that they were too focused on shifting the party in their direction, while Biden was the first Democratic president since LBJ who seemed to prioritize the party as a coalition over himself.
And that’s at the core of why so many Democrats in Chicago will be cheering Biden. He was a party leader who accepted the idea that he wasn’t bigger than the party. That’s no easy thing for any president to do. Most presidents get to the office by having too much self-confidence — and that’s not to say Biden lacks self-confidence. But he’s reality-based enough to make admissions like the one he made last week, when he said his continued candidacy could have ripped his party apart down the ballot and that wasn’t something he wanted to be his legacy.
His place in history will have everything to do with not just the outcome this November but also the outcome of the next presidential term. The more successful Harris is, the better for Biden’s legacy. A two-term Harris presidency would be the ideal outcome for those hoping Biden is eventually lionized, since that would mean she was able to oversee the implementation of Biden’s legislative achievements and, potentially, that those policies are popular over the years to come.
If Trump wins this November, Biden’s legacy gets a lot more complicated. On one hand, his most devoted loyalists would whisper “told you so,” since some of them had argued Biden was the one Democrat uniquely suited to beat Trump. But I suspect there would be louder voices in the party who would most likely blame Biden for a Harris loss even more than they blamed Harris. The argument would be that if he had gotten out sooner, there might have been a chance to nominate a stronger ticket. Harris will always owe Biden, and, in turn, Biden will get blame for her failures — and reflected glory if she succeeds, since he picked her to be his running mate.
Bottom line: Biden’s legacy depends on whether Trump and Trumpism succeed or fail at the ballot box going forward. If this is the election that finally does push Trump out of U.S. politics and into U.S. history, Biden will be seen as a successful transitional president, akin to a Harry Truman or even a George H.W. Bush.
But any return of Trump or Trumpism would reflect poorly on him. There’s no sugar-coating it.
Echoes of a more divided time in America
There are so many near-historical anomalies with this election. And I say “near” because, while so many things about the switch from Biden to Harris seem unprecedented, they aren’t. Even the possibility of having three one-term presidents in a row isn’t unprecedented.
Here are just a few of the near-unprecedented outcomes we could see with this election.
A Harris victory would mean a one-term president was succeeded by someone from the same party, which has happened only two other times: once by the Democrats (Franklin Pierce to James Buchanan, not exactly two of the party’s best and brightest) and once by the Republicans (Rutherford B. Hayes to James Garfield).
To me, it’s no accident we have to go back to the divisive times of the 1850s to the 1890s to find similarities to the politics we are experiencing today.
A Trump victory would be the second-ever comeback by a defeated president (the first was Grover Cleveland … in the 1890s).
And if you are wondering when was the last time we had two or more one-term presidents in a row, you’d be right if you guessed that it took place in that same tumultuous period. Before the Civil War and the rise of Abe Lincoln, the U.S. had six consecutive one-term presidents. And after Ulysses S. Grant, we had five consecutive one-term presidents until William McKinley.
We can hope it doesn’t take an actual civil war or a near-civil war to get out of this current period of polarization. But it’s sobering to realize that today’s political tumult looks a lot like what happened in the last half of the 19th century.
