But I do think — all in all — that [Burr] does himself — all of us — a disservice by…” The tentative crooked smile again, the voice suddenly, deliberately soft. “… well, by living so very, very long — so unnaturally long — a continuous reminder of things best forgotten.
Washington Irving in Burr, Gore Vidal
What did Joe Biden’s presidency actually mean? There is a sense he is already shrinking back, slowly fading into history since abandoning his tilt at reelection last July. In his farewell speech, delivered yesterday from the Oval Office, the gravitas he had once been able to summon by his sheer endurance — the length of his public life, his dignified forbearance under repeated, devastating personal loss — appeared long gone.
The speech was fine. Nothing numinous, the headline moment was his identification of an “oligarchy” in the US. It was solid enough, but he looked and sounded so very tired, the eyes narrow with exertion, the now familiar stumbling over mashed words. Whether or not Biden’s belief that he could have beaten Trump is true (and it seems less and less credible), on a human level, it’s a relief to know we won’t see what another four years in the world’s most demanding job would have done to him, assuming he would have even made it that far.
That’s the awful thing about the “legacy” of a president: the only impression that endures is how it ends. Inevitably, like the proverbial tiger, it turns and devours everything that came before.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, figureheads of the Democratic left, both recently said that on domestic issues (and only domestic issues), Biden had more or less lived up to his promise to be the most progressive president since FDR. Those policies — antitrust, the role of organised labour, the attempts at reshoring manufacturing with a green tint — were hugely ambitious and went against what the role of government and regulation had become in American life.
But these were largely complicated, long-term projects. Perhaps in the feverish media atmosphere of the 2020s, no politician could have been expected to coherently explain such programs to the electorate, setting them as a lasting alternative to Trumpism. The Joe Biden of the last few years, increasingly muffled and foggy, as though addressing us from behind frosted glass, certainly wasn’t the man for the job.
Thus the best and most ambitious parts of Biden’s presidency are conclusively lost to the general impression of his time in office. We perhaps knew would this would happen regardless of November’s outcome; Kamala Harris, his putative replacement, steadfastly avoided mentioning his name during her campaign.
Once you take his domestic program away, what I suspect history will retain of Biden’s single term in office is grim.
Time and time again, Biden allowed the criminal Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him, as tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including nearly 20,000 children, were massacred via bombardment, starvation, or from freezing to death. Biden was eager to take credit for the possible ceasefire agreement reached in his final days in office, pointing out in his farewell address that it contained the same basic elements as he had put forward in May last year.
He didn’t seem to register how the wasted bloody months since reflected on him and his use of America’s power. Biden’s active complicity in this crime will in time come to be viewed the same way as Nixon and Johnson’s in Vietnam, or George Bush Jr’s in Iraq. Incidentally, there was a vomitous tang to the tut-tutting in the commentariat’s near-uniform contention that it was Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, that tarnished Joe’s reputation.
It was also clear in the lead-up to November’s poll that the Democrats had actively shifted their role in the public mind to replace the Republicans as the party of war.
Fintan O’Toole’s magisterial portrait of then future president Joe Biden in January 2020, “The Designated Mourner”, noted that by 1988 it was already an acknowledged cliché to say that the Delaware senator’s life “was touched by personal tragedy”. His first wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a 1972 car crash. More was to come, with his son Beau taken by brain cancer in 2015. He lost and lost.
“Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics,” O’Toole wrote. “He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.”
And so it ends, with Biden remembered as the US president who watched the White House, the House and the Senate fall to Donald Trump’s Republicans. Between this and the courts, the control of the country afforded to that coterie — with all its religious fanaticism and dreamy fascist rhetoric — is more or less unfettered. It has turned Biden’s time as president into the negative image of what it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be the steady, if uninspiring, hand that guides the republic back to normalcy following the unpleasantness of 2016 to 2020. Instead, he confirmed the era as Trump’s.
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