I learned things I had not known from watching him stagger to failure.
There were times in the last few years when I considered Joe Biden the most successful occupant of the presidency for the majority of us that I'd seen since LBJ. New York Times business columnist Peter Coy (gift) summarized some of what Biden accomplished:
... he rose to the occasion of fighting the Covid pandemic and its economic effects. Although the recession was over by the time he was sworn in, the unemployment rate was still elevated at 6.4 percent. He had served as vice president during the feeble, “jobless” recovery from the recession of 2007-9, and he was determined to prevent a repeat of that slump.
Less than two months after taking office, Biden got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included stimulus checks of $1,400 per person, extended unemployment insurance and a beefed-up child tax credit. That November, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized $1.2 trillion of transportation and infrastructure spending.
Those bills did what they were intended to do. They speeded the economic recovery and brought down unemployment, helping the poor and working class most of all. The expanded child tax credit alone cut child poverty nearly in half.Heather Cox Richardson spells it out:
The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%. Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.
Observing these successes, I thought Biden's age gave him a secret sauce: his orientation to governing was formed in the years before Ronald Reagan's "revolution" dethroned the idea of an activist federal state that worked for the benefit of the people. Reagan and the GOPers sold an exhausted people on the hokum that "the best government governs least." This was always stupid and unworkable; today, the notion merely makes room for oligarchs to rob us blind.
Biden's basic orientation was toward building a more equitable state and economy. This enabled him to ally with Elizabeth Warren's technocrats on interventions that haven't yet been fully realized. I suspect that our new MAGA overlords will bluster and howl, but they'll also take credit as much of this survives and works out for their constituents.
Biden's deep experience of American foreign policy and influence in the world helped him at times and also left him up shit creek when he couldn't adjust to contemporary realities.
Ditching our failed state-building project in Afghanistan was unequivocally the right move. Twenty years of failure needed to be shucked off. And Trump had set Biden up to get out. But the mismanagement that killed US troops and left too many Afghans in the lurch was horrible and compound the ugliness of the whole misbegotten enterprise.
The Biden administration initially responded forcefully to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then retreated to timidity when only an all-in commitment was going enable the Ukrainians to repel the invading imperialist power. The tragedy of Ukraine reminds me of the failure of the democratic states -- Britain, France, and the US -- to support the messy but legitimate government of Republican Spain in the mid-1930s against Hitler and Mussolini. We can only hope the consequence will not be similar, forcing the more law-abiding and democratic states to fight the authoritarian axis somewhere else if we're to survive. And now we've elected the modern America Firsters who always wanted capitulation to the dictators ...
And then there is Israel, the Palestinians, and the multiple oil autocracies of what Europe labels the Near East. Biden has been utterly clueless in this arena since October 7, 2023. His age and experience seems to have gifted him with completely the wrong lessons and, bluntly, the wrong racial and ethnic sympathies. His policies seem to assume that Palestinians are uppity natives to be repressed. His supine posture toward Bibi and enabling the demise of any chance for a decent order in the region has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, from day one.
All this was made more fragile and less understandable because aging Joe had lost any feel he ever had for communicating his aims to his riling constituencies. He was the president who wasn't there. And sending Kamala out to the rescue at the last minute couldn't save his legacy.
Jim Fallows is gentle about Joe. He's seen a few presidents up close.
Presidents obsess about their place in history, mainly because they can’t control it. Joe Biden must have dreamed of being seen as another FDR. His best chance now is to be seen as another Harry Truman or even Jimmy Carter—under-appreciated in his time and then gaining respect for the long-term effects of his work.
[in his final address] ... like Dwight Eisenhower before him, Biden was in fact honest. Brutally, unsparingly so. He was honest about who was causing problems: The modern versions of robber barons, and the politicians they had bought or intimidates. He was honest that citizens had to do something themselves if they didn’t like the trends, rather than waiting for someone to save them. He was presumably honest enough with himself to imagine the outrage and attacks the speech would certainly provoke. Honest enough to imply that some of the centrist reassurances of his career may have been naive.Biden seemed a good and decent man trying to do a job he was too aged for and perhaps also a job that his experience had both suited and unfitted him for in contradictory ways. On to the next American misadventure ...
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