Biden’s legacy: Far-reaching accomplishments that didn’t translate into political support
WASHINGTON — Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an animated President Joe Biden 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, as well as the continuing threat to democracy that he felt Donald Trump posed.
How could Biden heal that collective trauma?
“Be confident,” he said emphatically in a interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”
But in 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 Junehe lost the benefit of the doubt and withdrew as his party’s candidate on Sunday.
After the debate, a sudden rift emerged between Democrats, determined to prevent Trump from getting another term. Republicans, plagued by chaos in Congress and the conviction of the former president, formed an unlikely unity.
Biden has never understood how to inspire the most powerful country in the world to believe in itself, let alone in him.
He lost the confidence of his supporters in the 90-minute debate with Trump, even though pride initially prompted him to ignore the fears of lawmakers, party elders and donors who urged him to drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, as if on cue, raised his fist in the air. Biden tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday while campaigning in Las Vegas and retreated to his Delaware beach house to recuperate.
The events of the past 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 misjudged the breadth of his support. While many Democrats deeply admired the president personally, they did not have the same affection for him politically.
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, noting that in an era of polarization, Biden proved that bipartisan legislation was still possible. Still, voters saw him as a temporary stand-in, and he could never transcend the text of his speeches to visually “embody the spirit of the nation with a sense of verve, energy and optimism.”
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.
There was never a “Joe Biden Democrat” like there was a “Reagan Republican.” He had no adoring, movement-like following like Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy. He was not a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only groundbreaking dimension of his election was that he was the oldest person ever elected president.
While he repeatedly considered entering the White House 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 plagiarism, and he failed to make it to the first nomination fight. When he ran for office in 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he won less than 1% of the vote. In 2016, Obama advised him not to run, even though he was Obama’s vice president. A Biden victory in 2020 seemed unlikely when he finished 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 an incumbent president, Trump, who had been a catalyst for a boiling sense of polarization. He then had to withstand the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. 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 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.”
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 hardly a reflection of 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’s going to take a while to happen,” Biden told BET News on Tuesday. But in that same interview, he also revealed why the calls to step aside had grown louder: He couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, who referred to him as the “Black man.”
Those recent episodes stand in stark contrast to a list of accomplishments that most presidents would envy and use as a solid foundation for reelection. The optimism about the country’s future that Biden says drove him could materialize after his departure from the national stage.
Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and a key adviser during the Obama administration, said Biden “came into office as the economy was in the grip of COVID and helped oversee the transition out of it to an economy that is now growing faster than any other economy, with less inflation than they have.”
Furman noted that Biden increased spending to invest in the economy over the long term while keeping Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair, giving the Fed the ability to raise rates and curb inflation without disrupting the labor market.
In March 2021, Biden rolled out $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, creating a raft of new programs that temporarily halved child poverty, halted evictions and helped create 15.7 million jobs. But inflation began to rise soon afterward. Biden’s approval rating, as measured by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, fell from 61% to 39% in June.
He then implemented a series of executive actions to untangle global supply chains and passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that not only replaced aging infrastructure, but also improved internet access and prepared communities for climate change.
But the infrastructure bill also showed how difficult it was for Biden to get public recognition for his achievement, as many of the projects will take decades to complete.
In 2022, Biden and his party colleagues followed the Democrats with two measures that breathed new life into the future of American manufacturing.
The CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion to build factories and establish institutions to make computer chips domestically, giving the U.S. access to the most advanced semiconductors needed to fuel economic growth and maintain national security. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided incentives to divest from fossil fuels and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Biden also sought to compete more aggressively with China and rebuild alliances such as NATO. He completed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, an effort that was widely criticized. The president also faced criticism over his handling of the southern border with Mexico, as illegal border crossings raised concerns about his handling of immigration.
In addition, he became embroiled in a series of global conflicts that further exposed domestic divisions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 exacerbated inflation as Trump and other Republicans questioned the value of military aid to Ukrainians. Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sparked a war that exposed divisions within the Democratic Party over whether the United States should continue supporting Israel, while tens of thousands of Palestinians died in months of counterattacks.
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.
And yet, just days before he withdrew from the race, Biden felt his work was unfinished and his legacy incomplete.
“I have to finish this job,” he told reporters after a NATO summit.
But the scale of the stakes and fear of Biden’s defeat led Democrats to bet that the tasks he had begun would be best carried out by a younger generation.
“History will be kinder to him than the voters were at the end,” Axelrod said.