Biden got screwed

His presidency is a reminder that we have no control over who tells our story

We’re going to be getting a lot of post-mortems on the one-term Biden presidency over the next month or two. Just registering my take, I think the best lesson to draw from Biden’s presidency is a quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton”: “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Biden has been one of the most effective presidents of my lifetime, delivering on more party priorities and progressive goals in four short years than just about anyone thought possible. And he leaves office largely reviled, including by many he sought to help.

Biden, the first (though likely not the last) octogenarian US president, in many ways seems like the last gasp of a 20^th century political style in US politics that valued norms, lawmaking, moderation, experience, and camaraderie in government. Those are, of course, mostly positive things, but also carry some of the worst ghosts of the last century. Remember that the big dust up in 2019 when Kamala Harris zinged Biden in a Democratic debate was over the fact that he had bragged about his camaraderie with segregationists in the Senate. The mid-20th century Senate was collegial; that is not the same as good.

But the 21^st century leadership style is better characterized by the inherent identity claims of presidents like Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In this mind set, one of Obama’s greatest achievements was simply being a Black man in the White House, and one of Trump’s greatest achievements was restoring the Angry White Man to the seat of power.

The Obama-Biden contrast is an interesting one, and in some ways is reminiscent of the contrast between John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In both cases, a young, attractive, inexperienced, and inspirational leader captured the nation’s (and the world’s) attention. Both Obama and Kennedy had some policy accomplishments — the Affordable Care Act is a substantial and important piece of legislation — but were hampered in some ways by their opposition and by their own inexperience. They remain greatly loved by their party.

Yet LBJ and Biden — who actually did know how Congress worked and produced considerable legislative accomplishments — are mostly remembered negatively. Johnson, who deserves significant credit for the passage of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and much of the modern welfare state, saw his reputation tumble as the Vietnam War raged on and became increasingly unpopular. Biden, similarly, deserves credit for managing a post-Covid economy and engineering a “soft landing” that limited inflation and prevented mass layoffs, and was actually one of the world’s true Covid recovery success stories. He has also secured the passage of the most significant federal legislation for climate change mitigation and promoting electric vehicles, massive student loan forgiveness, Covid mitigation funding, a gun safety bill, and more. He worked to strengthen labor unions, which have been on the decline for decades. And the fact that Ukraine remains an independent democracy nearly three years after being attacked by Russia is due in no small part to Biden’s leadership.

And yet Biden remains deeply unpopular. We’ll be arguing for years about just why that is the case. My own take is that presidents in the modern era are just doomed to approval ratings of around 40% thanks to extensive party polarization. But it’s important to note that Biden came in with reasonably high approval ratings, and they tanked in the middle of his first year because he ended an unpopular war. That seems weird to write but it’s nonetheless true; the pullout from Afghanistan went poorly, and the 13 servicemembers who died in that chaotic moment somehow mattered more than the 2,446 who died over the previous 19 years. Biden ended an unpopular war and got pilloried for it by the media and by voters across the ideological spectrum. His approval took a ten point hit and never recovered. If those on the left calling him “Genocide Joe” today offered him praise for actually ending a war that was within his power to end, I certainly didn’t hear it.

I’m certainly not saying there isn’t plenty to criticize Biden for. Obviously there is. While I recognize the difficulty of his coalitional position on Israel, and I doubt he would have been any more popular for cutting off Israeli aid, he turned a blind eye to a horrible series of human rights violations and war crimes. Also, I don’t know how much it really matters in the end — possibly a great deal! — but he really wasn’t a great communicator. He was never a particular poet on the stump or a great debater, and age took a notable toll on his modest skills in this area. And while I think his decision to run for a second term was defensible, given that he’d actually beaten Trump previously and he had a solid record to run on, once it was clear how atrophied his campaign skills were, he really should have hung it up some time earlier.

But here I’ll quote from another sometimes cringe writer, Aaron Sorkin: “We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight.” That’s not wrong. Biden’s stubborn unpopularity even during an economic recovery with record low unemployment and no US troops dying overseas really is a puzzle. And it puts him in a category with George H.W. Bush, another more technocratic president who uninspiringly followed a beloved movement leader and couldn’t understand why a recovering economy wasn’t helping him. Bush, Biden, and to some extent Johnson look better in hindsight than they did in office. We may say that “history will judge them well,” but that and $6 will get them a bag of airport Doritos.

I will continue to argue that a key lesson of politics is that product is more important than salesmanship. But Biden had a good product and still couldn’t sell it to an electorate that didn’t want to believe him. He even handed off to Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ designated hitter, and she made more of a game of it but still couldn’t close the deal.

Right now I’m not sure what to advise a president who wants to win reelection. No one’s done it since 2012. And the game’s different now.

But Biden’s experience reminds us that there’s a lot outside the control of even the President of the United States. You can do a lot of things right, but it’s hard to make people see that when they’re already convinced otherwise.