In all the election recriminations going on, let’s not forget President Joe Biden | Opinion
Joe Biden lost this election.
It wasn’t easy to make a winner of a corrupt, incoherent coup plotter, but the president beat the odds. His decisions enabled his predecessor to overcome tons of baggage and historic unpopularity. Now a man who took pride in sparing the country a second helping of President Trump will be remembered for merely postponing it.
This debacle began in 2018 when Biden surveyed the political landscape and found that he, a relic of the Nixon era, was the man to lead America into the future. He quickly faced questions about his age. Democrats worried that voters would balk at seeing a president turn 80 in the White House.
Then came the 2019 primary debates. After his progressive rivals scrambled leftward like airline passengers fighting for a window seat, Biden looked like a better bet for the general election. He led the polls through most of the campaign and secured the nomination by March 2020.
We know now that the former vice president was in fact too old to effectively serve a full term and should not have run. Nevertheless he won. If you believed the rhetoric from his allies, you expected a moderate who would return the country to normal and then pass the torch. If you believed the agenda Biden co-wrote with Bernie Sanders and Biden’s own statements about his career plans, you expected a big-spending liberal who would keep his options open.
Shockingly, it was door #2. The new president reversed Trump’s executive orders wherever he found them, opened the border and launched a massive federal spending spree. The “transition” presidency became a “transformation” presidency.
The door #1 voters felt duped, but so what? Approval numbers in the mid-50s had Democrats celebrating the reincarnation of FDR – at least until two generations of Americans got their first taste of inflation. Then the mood soured, and the honeymoon was over. Seven months after he took office, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan pushed Biden’s job approval underwater, where it remains today.
As ill-advised as his 2020 run was, Biden’s decision to run again was worse. He asked voters who had given him failing grades for three years to keep him in office to age 86. Perhaps his June debate performance explains how he could imagine that working, but what about his family, his staff and his party? How could they imagine propping up a figurehead in the Oval Office until 2029?
They didn’t. They hoped to conceal the president’s mental decline well enough to get past the election. After a respectable waiting period, he could resign and hand the keys to Kamala Harris.
Trying to hide a president during his own reelection campaign is tricky business, but Biden didn’t leave the party any good options. His last chance to do that came and went in 2023. He should have faced the truth about his condition – the staffers who were limiting his public appearances certainly had – and announced that he would retire at the end of his term.
The ensuing competition wouldn’t have yielded any superstars because it wasn’t that kind of draft year. But whether the vice president or a challenger had prevailed, a real primary would have given Democrats a seasoned candidate with months of media exposure and the credibility conferred by millions of votes.
Instead, Harris was thrust on voters 15 weeks before election day. If vice presidential comings and goings aren’t part of your news diet, she was a blank slate – the alternative to the devil you knew. Better informed voters knew that Democrats had discussed replacing her as Biden’s running mate since 2021. Her metamorphosis from dead weight to ambassador of joy rang a bit hollow for them.
To be fair, Harris was a better campaigner than four years ago. But she couldn’t escape the record that kept Biden’s job ratings (and her own) in the low 40s through most of their tenure. Nor could she overcome the time crunch created by the president’s refusal to quit the race unless he heard from the Lord Almighty. (The Almighty finally came to him in the form of Nancy Pelosi.)
“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said in 2020. Four years later his heir apparent found herself standing in a hole he dug, in dire need of a ladder.
Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown, Kentucky