WASHINGTON (AP) — Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, a President Joe Biden describes the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.
The United States has faced a pandemic that has upended life, soaring inflation and now a global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, as well as a continuing threat to democracy, he said. Donald Trump laid.
How could Biden heal this collective trauma?
“Be confident,” he said emphatically in a Interview with the Associated Press“Have confidence. Because I have confidence.”
But over the next two years, the The confidence Biden hoped to inspire has gradually waned. 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.
In the aftermath of the debate, Democrats who had been united in their determination to prevent another Trump term suddenly became divided, and Republicans, reeling from chaos in Congress and the former president’s criminal conviction, came together in improbably defiant unity.
Biden has never been able to figure out how to inspire the most powerful country in the world to believe in itself, much less him.
He lost the trust of his supporters during the 90-minute debate with Trump, even as hubris initially pushed him to override the fears of lawmakers, party elders and donors that he would drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, as if on cue, raised his fist in force. Biden, then campaigning in Las Vegas, tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday and retreated to his Delaware beach house to recover.
The events of the past three weeks have led to an exit Biden never wanted, but Democrats felt it was essential to maximize their chances of winning in November.
Biden appears to have misread the breadth of his support. While many Democrats deeply admired the president on a personal level, they did not have the same affection for him on a political level.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, said Biden arrived as a reprieve for a nation exhausted by Trump and the pandemic.
“He was the perfect person for this moment,” Brinkley said, noting that Biden proved in a polarizing era that bipartisan legislation was still possible. Yet voters viewed him as a surrogate, and he was never able to 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 rally voters around their fears that Trump would doom American democracy.
There was never a “Democratic Joe Biden” like there was a “Republican Reagan.” He didn’t have an adoring, movement-like following like Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy. He wasn’t a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only barrier-breaking dimension of his election was the fact that he was the oldest person ever elected president.
While he repeatedly considered a seat in the Oval Office from his seat as a senator from Delaware, voters repeatedly rejected him.
His first campaign for the White House, in 1988, ended in self-inflicted wounds resulting from plagiarism, and he failed to run in the first election. When he ran 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 a dramatic rebound in South Carolina.
He won the nomination and then did something rare in American politics: He defeated an incumbent, Trump, who had been the catalyst for a seething sense of polarization. He then had to withstand the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters who falsely claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen.
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said history will treat Biden more kindly than voters did, not only because of his legislative accomplishments but also because he beat Trump.
“His legacy is significant beyond his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who took charge and defeated a president who placed himself above our democracy.”
“This alone is a historic achievement.”
But Biden failed to overcome his age. And when he showed signs of weakness in his walk and speech, he could not count on strong support to back him up. It was a humiliating end to a half-century of political career, but one that hardly reflects the legacy of his time in the White House.
His record includes laws that will rebuild the country in ways that will likely be seen over the next dozen years, even if voters did not immediately appreciate it.
“It takes time,” Biden told BET News on Tuesday. But in that same interview, he also demonstrated why calls for his resignation have grown louder: He was unable to remember the name of his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, calling him a “black man.”
These recent episodes stand in stark contrast to the 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 said drove him could materialize after he leaves the national stage.
Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a top adviser to the Obama administration, said Biden “came to power as the economy struggled with COVID and helped oversee the transition to an economy that is now growing faster than any of its peer economies, with lower inflation than it is today.”
Furman noted that Biden has increased spending to make longer-term investments in the economy while keeping Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair, giving the Fed cover to raise rates and lower inflation without disrupting the labor market.
In March 2021, Biden launched a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, creating a series of new programs that temporarily halved child poverty, halted evictions and helped create 15.7 million jobs. But inflation began to rise soon after. 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 aimed at unlocking global supply chains and a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that not only replaced aging infrastructure, but also improved internet access and prepared communities to withstand climate change.
But the infrastructure bill also revealed the challenge Biden faces in getting the public to recognize his accomplishments, because many projects will take decades to complete.
In 2022, Biden and his fellow Democrats followed up with two measures that reinvigorated the future of American manufacturing.
The CHIPS and Science Act allocated $52 billion to build factories and establish institutions to produce computer chips in the United States, ensuring that the United States had access to the most advanced semiconductors needed to grow the economy and maintain national security. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act, which encouraged the United States to abandon fossil fuels and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Biden has also sought to compete more aggressively with China and rebuild alliances like NATO. He completed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, an effort that has been widely criticized. The president has also been criticized for his handling of the southern border with Mexico, as illegal border crossings have raised concerns about his handling of immigration.
It also found itself embroiled in a series of global conflicts that exposed new national divisions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 worsened inflation, with Trump and other Republicans questioning the value of military aid to the Ukrainians. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, sparked a war that exposed divisions within the Democratic Party over whether the United States should continue to support Israel as tens of thousands of Palestinians have died in months of counterattacks.
Biden has privately urged his advisers not to focus on differences when listening to the public, but to seek agreement. He has adhered to the ideal of bipartisanship even as Democrats have broken with the Republican Party.
And yet, days before dropping out of 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 magnitude of the stakes and the fear of a Biden defeat have led Democrats to bet that the tasks he started could be better accomplished by a younger generation.
“History will be kinder to him than the voters were in the end,” Axelrod said.
