What to Make of Joe Biden's Legacy
By: Brian Stelter (Vanity Fair)
Joe Biden remains the President. Speaking about Biden in past tense might soothe the zeitgeist of blue bubble dwellers. But the intellectually contrived alternate potentiality collapses when confronted with the hard sharpness of actuality. The blue bubble bursts.
Speaking in past tense of the leader of the liberal world seems quite apropos. Joe Biden presided over the decline and fall of the liberal worldview in the United States. The governments of Germany and France have collapsed. The Netherlands is carrying the cross of regret on behalf of European colonialism. The International Criminal Court has begun indicting world leaders in an effort to fill the liberal void of secular outrage. European NATO no longer exerts restraint on Ukraine; Zelensky's political need for populist revenge has warped the liberal's democratic process. Israel has single handedly shown that the two state solution has always been nothing more than a liberal pipedream used to maintain a stalemate of uncertainty. South Korea is in turmoil. China faces neoliberal economic headwinds unrelated to who will be President. Every little Asian country touched by the finger of liberal democracy has experienced sharp increases in political violence. India is still trying to ride the fence but the guardrails of the liberal worldview are falling underneath them.
The entire world is engaged in a referendum on the worldview of liberal institutionalism. Fate has chosen Joe Biden to preside over a global shift in political philosophy. Joe Biden is the perfect leader for this time in human history. And Joe Biden is still not a past tense leader. Joe Biden remains as President and leader of the liberal worldview until January 20th, 2025.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Though Democrats officially lost the 2024 election last month, Astead Herndon suggests they effectively lost it early last year, "when they rallied around the reelection of Joe Biden, back when there was a lot of evidence the country didn't want that."
Herndon, a New York Times national politics reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast, recalls on the latest episode of Inside the Hive how Biden's unpopularity had been apparent for years if you looked outside the DC bubble, and how the 2020 coalition that brought him to power was "always fairly tenuous."
"One of the things that I think blew my mind was I remembered the discussion of Biden's age, even back at the time," Herndon says. "I remember talking to voters who were concerned he was too old to serve for second terms, and I remember the efforts that the Biden campaign did to kind of imply that maybe that's something that they could deal with down the road. And that, for a lot of people, was a message that worked. They simply said, 'Hey, we'll deal with that come four years from now, but right now it's about stopping Donald Trump.'"
Although Biden could count major legislative accomplishments in his first two years in office, events perceived as "wins" among Democrats and framed as such in the political media, many Americans weren't feeling the effects. And yet Biden, now in his 80s, was running for reelection with the party behind him. "Democrats, I think, got trapped in kind of believing their own hype more so than I think working from the premise where a lot of Americans started from, which is that Joe Biden was there to get rid of Donald Trump. And so what came next?"
While Biden never explicitly ruled out running for a second term, his 2020 vow to be a "bridge" to "an entire generation" of Democratic leaders was perceived by many that way. "In some ways, Kamala Harris running in 2024 was exactly what a lot of people expected to happen in 2020," Herndon notes. "What changed was that Joe Biden and Democrats retrenched on that implication and robbed themselves of a primary." Herndon says that if Biden had considered Harris his successor early on for the 2024 race, he "could have acknowledged that from the start and set her up for success" or "if that wasn't the person he wanted, he could have chosen a different person who he did want to set up for success."
"I think there's a lot of other different options that could have taken place," he adds. "I just think that they kind of chose the worst one. They sidelined the person then, and kind of argued it could only be him, then had to shift to the person in a crisis with three months left."
Herndon, a National Magazine Awards finalist for his 2023 profile of Harris, says he "thought Joe Biden's age was an undeniable ticking political crisis. No matter what." To Herndon "it was just a matter of when and how they would deal with Kamala Harris because she was going to be the obvious person." So "even if he won," he adds, "there would have been a democratic crisis in 2025."
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The Fat Lady may be fine tuning her voice in the wings. But the final dirge is yet to be sung. Joe Biden is not a past tense President quite yet. And, as Biden has stated, there is more work yet to be done.
Liberals, beware the pins and needles of February. That liberal bubble of intellectually contrived potentiality is about to meet the pointy tip of actuality. And human history begins a new chapter.
He will be remembered as a bottom tier president, no doubt. The preemptive pardons plot, if true will push him farther down.
Perhaps he can ask Obama which Subaru dealer he went to to buy a Legacy...............
Bidens legacy is so fucked at this point his presidential library may be in front of his house in one of these.
For the "good" he's done? Much smaller box with thin paperbacks.
And maybe a coupon book for sex change operations?
Paperbacks?! Comic books are more fitting.
Would've been here but Biden had to give it up, you know, because Trump.
The sad thing is, once Joe is gone, Hunter will probably sell it to a crack dealer to cover his habit, or wreck it drunk driving.
His term started with lies, went 4 years on lies and ended with lies. Hell, they're still spooning out the lies.
Actually, his whole career on taxpayer paid mooching of 50 years was one big lie