This Is (Almost) The End Biden’s Political Career Deserves

(Drew Angerer/Getty via the New Yorker)

On July 21st, Joe Biden finally acknowledged what a majority of Americans have known for years: he is too old to be president for another term. Had he sooner recognized that being an octogenarian with a consistently lousy approval rating made him a poor candidate, there could have been an actual primary to determine his successor. As it is, the odds seem to be on Kamala Harris being more or less handed the nomination, rubber-stamped by the party insiders at August’s Democratic National Convention. 

Biden stepping down puts his own party in an unprecedented, and hardly desirable, position. It was a decision that came only after a terrible debate performance, public calls for Biden to drop out by many Democratic politicians, and polling that consistently showed him well behind Trump, both nationally and in key swing states. All of that makes it particularly rich that a number of liberal commentators have praised it as some selfless act of political heroism. If the Democrats lose to Trump in November — as well they might — no single person will be more to blame than Joe Biden.

It’s a fitting end to an awful career: a defeated, embittered Biden with his approval rating in the thirties, forced to step down by his own party because he’s too unpopular and too inarticulate for them to take a chance on. The first incumbent president since LBJ not to run for a second term. The only more appropriate end would have been for Biden to stay in and lose, cementing his legacy as an unpopular one-termer whose ego brought Donald Trump back to power. But as much as Biden might deserve that, the rest of us don’t deserve the havoc of another Trump term — though, again, we might still get it anyway. 

Why do I render such a harsh judgment on Joe Biden, of all people? Let’s count the reasons. Biden’s national political career started in the Senate, where he served for decades. His record there was so long and abominable that a list of his Greatest Hits should suffice. There was the time he led the liberal opposition to desegregation busing, working with ardent racist James Eastland to do so. Or when he supported tough-on-crime legislation to the right of what the Reagan administration wanted. Or when he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Or when, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he not only supported the Iraq War but invited a slate of witnesses whose rampant falsehoods helped justify it. Or the disgusting bankruptcy bill he helped foist on us, making it more difficult for people drowning in debt (including medical debt) to discharge it. 

Biden had presidential aspirations from early on. He first ran in the campaign for the 1988 election but self-sabotaged when he got caught plagiarizing a campaign speech and telling blatant lies about his life and academic record. Incidentally, this sort of reckless dishonesty and outright stupidity is a consistent throughline in Biden’s life, from the time he failed a class in law school for plagiarism to the plentiful, easily disproven lies he’s told in recent years. He ran again in 2008 and flopped again, but got enough attention to end up getting tapped by Obama to be the half of the ticket that wouldn’t scare racist whites away. That, of course, paved the way to his 2020 bid — which nearly ended in another failure, and would have if the Democratic Establishment hadn’t been desperate to keep Bernie Sanders from the nomination.

Then we come to Biden’s presidency. As I noted before, he is probably, on economic policy, the best president of my lifetime, or even since the end of the New Deal era. It says little either way, and one shouldn’t overstate Biden’s differences from his predecessors. We didn’t get a 15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage. We didn’t get a public health insurance option. We didn’t get $10,000 apiece in student loan forgiveness — the clumsy, means-tested way Biden went about it gave the courts plenty of time to block the program before a single cent was forgiven. The liberal narrative has been that the economy is doing swimmingly, but most people disagree, and there are plenty of indicators to show that the working class isn’t thriving. “Better” is something, but it still isn’t good enough.

And, of course, Biden’s active assistance in Israel’s genocidal violence against Gaza overshadows the rest of his middling presidency at this point. Spitting in the face of many of the young voters, left-leaning voters, Muslim voters, and Arab voters who helped put him in the White House, Biden has spent the better part of a year providing material assistance and diplomatic cover for a hard-right government to carry out mass murder. The Lancet estimates, conservatively, that the death toll from the violence so far may end being 186,000 or more. To add insult to injury, Biden has let himself be used and humiliated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly favors Trump in the upcoming election. Biden’s role in the Gaza genocide is more shameful than anything from the Obama or even Trump years. 

And so, now that he has announced he won’t run for reelection, we see Biden’s horrific political career drawing to a close. He is an exemplary case of the Banality of Evil — a man who, through a combination of ego, careerism, and stupidity, has helped unleash untold suffering across his country and the world. In a better world, instead of a debate stage, he and Donald Trump might have shared a cell.