The fallback defense of Joe Biden: It's just going to take time to realize all the good he did.
Who knew Biden was such a visionary?
This Washington Post article bears the pretentious title: “Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy.” A better title would be: “The Washington Post’s lonely battle to sell its version of Joe Biden’s presidency.”
Organs like the Post make it their business to praise failed Democratic presidents. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was such a tough sell, that the mainstream media settled for claiming that his post presidency was great. It was not.
In Joe Biden’s case, the liberal media’s position was that his economic policies were highly successful, but that the American public was too ignorant to appreciate them. With Democrats trying to work their way back into the public’s good graces, this line will no longer do.
Thus, a more palatable variation has emerged: Biden’s economic policies were great, but they won’t pay visible dividends for many years.
The Post article about Biden’s “lonely battle” expounds (or parrots) this modified line:
“The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview.
Sullivan added that Biden’s accomplishments by their nature will take a long time to bear fruit. “How to govern at this moment to set the U.S. up for long-term success has one answer, and how to govern to deal with midterm and presidential elections in the very short term might have a different answer,” he said. “The president went with doing the things that really put America in a strong position.”
Biden humbly concurs:
On the morning after the election, Biden gathered his closest aides in the Oval Office to assemble a message to the broader staff. He wanted to communicate that progress happens on a long arc, he said; during his 50-year career, he’d seen that on every issue from climate to civil rights.
In the end, his comments to the staff sought to emphasize that their accomplishments would benefit America “for decades to come.”
Most unsuccessful presidents believe that history will show their policies to have been successful in the long run — ahead of their times, so to speak. The good thing about this claim is it can’t be disproved for years . On the other hand, no one can show it to be true when asserted. Also, it is too shamelessly self-serving to be taken seriously.
Just what are the Biden accomplishments that will yield fruit in the decades to come? The Post focuses on his spending programs, most notably the “Inflation Reduction Act” and the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.” Will programs like these really render Joe Biden a successful president in economic terms?
I don’t believe so. I believe they will be remembered mostly for adding to our national debt while producing little benefit.
The funny thing is that left-liberals don’t really believe much in Biden’s spending programs, either. They wanted spending at three or more times the level of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $891 billion. They vilified Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for slashing funding to that level. Clearly, they don’t see the “meager” amounts appropriated as a game-changer for the U.S. economy — now or in the coming decades.
The Post also pursues its lonely mission on Biden’s behalf by arguing that the president had the wrong style for these times — that he was too much about substance and not enough about style. That criticism, voiced by Rep. James Clyburn according to the Post, must be a new one for Biden.
Biden has never been much about substance, and whatever substantive positions he took — abortion, civil rights, foreign policy — were always subject to change with the political winds. Biden’s appeal, instead, was his style — Scranton Joe, rider of Amtrak and friend of the working man.
This style served Biden well enough in 2020. But the combination of working class discontentment and the apparent onset of senility meant made it a poor bet in 2024.
Other than being too much of a visionary and having the wrong style, Biden’s other main flaw, in Post’s telling, was his problem with messaging:
Biden’s critics fault him for failing to grasp that his record itself was not enough, that he needed to tell a story that would resonate in a tribal America. The president was so convinced that voters’ top priority was American democracy that he often made it his central campaign message. . . .
Not all Democrats were happy with that decision. White House aides remember sitting in the West Wing in the hours before Biden was to deliver a major speech on democracy and watching Faiz Shakir, who had managed Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, criticizing their message on NBC News. . . .
Shakir, in a recent interview, said he feels “even stronger now” that Biden — and then Harris — made a fatal mistake in not prioritizing voters’ everyday concerns about the economy. He pointed to Harris’s decision to deliver her campaign’s “closing argument” at the Ellipse, the site of Trump’s rally before the Jan. 6 attack, as evidence that Biden’s misguided view of the political landscape seeped through the Democratic Party.
Biden’s aides stress that the president spoke extensively about the economy, holding events around the country to tout “Bidenomics.” But in a sweeping prime-time address at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and with increasingly hard-hitting rhetoric — he said Trump’s movement represents “semi-fascism” and “threatens the very foundation of our republic” — the president left little doubt about his core message.
In hindsight, Biden’s problem was that neither message — Trump as a threat to democracy or Bidenomics as the answer to everyday concerns about the economy — was a winning one. The threat-to-democracy message, which Biden exaggerated, wasn’t convincing enough, given that Americans were so concerned about the economy. The concern-about-the-economy message wasn’t going to work because Americans blamed Biden for that concern.
If anything, Biden (and then Harris) were probably right to focus on Trump, rather than on the economy. That message had seemed to work in the midterms, in which Democrats prospered even with the economy faring none-too-well. And this time, the “existential threat” himself was on the ballot. Emphasizing his threat seemed less of a fool’s errand than trying to convince people how well the economy was working for them or that Democrats, after four years, had suddenly figured out the fix.
As for Biden’s legacy, his best hope for being remembered not-too-harshly by fair-minded observers is for Trump’s second term to be a failure. If the economy doesn’t improve or worsens, Biden will look okay by comparison. If Trump really does harm democracy, Biden will look like a prophet.
Even then, few will forget the Afghanistan fiasco or Biden’s diminished mental capacity and the attempts to cover it up (none of which is mentioned in the Post’s article). But at least, he might escape Jimmy Carter status — as Carter himself might have done had Ronald Reagan been unsuccessful.
I can just imagine the spin room coming up with talking points to defend Joe Biden
"I've got it! We'll say he was too much of a visionary!"
"Terrific. And we can also say that he told his staff that his plan would take 50 years to work. That he put the country ahead of his short term interests,"
"YOU ARE A GENIUS SIR. A GENIUS!"
Biden will be fortunate if he is not remembered as one of the worst , most corrupt presidents in history with a legacy of horrendous budget deficits and a country hurt immensely ( perhaps for decades) for his open border policies and the resultant crises. And his most lasting legacy may be the decline of the Democratic Party, whose coalition was supposed to be a durable emerging majority.