Joe Biden’s presidency has left the Democratic Party in turmoil. Despite the accolades, his tenure was marked by poor performance and failed ambitions. From a troubled academic past and plagiarized speeches to a lacklustre 2008 presidential run and unsuccessful attempts to address key issues, Biden’s presidency has been fraught with challenges. His poor memory and controversial choice of Kamala Harris as Vice President only compounded the difficulties, leaving the party grappling with his legacy and future direction.
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By R.W. Johnson
You would never guess it from the many tributes now being paid to Joe Biden but the outgoing President has done unparallelled harm to his party and his country. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Biden was a man of below average talent but of considerable ambition. In law school, where he graduated 76th in a class of 85, he failed a course after he was found to have plagiarised an article in a law review. From an early age he nourished the ambition of becoming a senator (which he achieved in 1972) and, later, president. He ran for president in 1988 but had to withdraw when it was revealed that he had plagiarised speeches by both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, by Hubert Humphrey and by the British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. He had also made misleading claims about his own life: that he had earned three degrees in college, that he had attended law school on a full scholarship, that he had graduated in the top half of his class and that he had marched in the civil rights movement. He had to call off his campaign when all this was revealed.
Biden ran for president again in 2008 but was completely eclipsed by the Hillary Clinton and Obama campaigns. He never reached 10% in the polls and soon withdrew. He then served two terms as Obama’s vice-president but after the death of his son, Beau, he announced that he would not run for President. In fact, this seems to have been only the cover reason. Biden had, naturally, hoped that Obama would endorse his presidential bid and he felt utterly betrayed when Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton instead. Obama-Biden relations have been cool ever since. Moreover, Biden felt sure that he could have beaten Trump in 2016. Even in 2020, when Biden rang Obama to say he was going to run against Trump, Obama’s response was far from overwhelming: “You know, you really don’t have to do this, Joe”.
Having won the presidency, Biden gave Vice President Harris the task of trying to bring some order to the southern border. This she comprehensively failed to do. Bizarrely, Biden then did nothing further about the problem, although Trump had shown the power of the border issue in his election campaign. Conscious that he was the oldest US President in history, Biden talked of himself as “a transitional president” and dwelt upon the wealth of younger talent in the Democratic party. However, such talk soon faded into silence.
Biden was very sensitive to the age issue from the start and sought to limit his exposure to public occasions when his famous propensity to utter speaking gaffes would be visible. In that sense Covid-19 was a lucky break since it meant that when he ran in 2020 he was able to avoid all public speaking engagements, even one-on-one interviews and instead ran his campaign via televised talks from his Delaware basement. But, of course, word seeped out of the President’s frailties and from an early stage Trump began to claim that Biden was demented. It was clear even from TV news clips that Biden had become unsteady on his feet and, when conversing with a group, tended to freeze or wander off on his own. Biden’s staff became expert in trying to disguise his frailties – walking in a group around him, for example, so as to disguise the President’s unsteady gait from the cameras.
The most striking gap lay in Biden’s pitifully few press conferences or in-depth interviews – and there seems little doubt that Biden was deliberately avoiding such public exposure. Ever since FDR presidential press conferences have been key occasions when the President attempts to build a personal rapport with his electorate but no President in modern times has held as few press conferences as Biden. Obama, in his eight years in office, held 164 such conferences. Trump, in his four years, held 88. Biden in his whole presidency held 34. And even that is a generous measure since it includes Biden’s furious response to Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his interview with Biden. Hur, whose job it was to assess whether Biden should be held liable for having held on to secret documents far longer than he should have, reported that Biden was “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” and instanced the fact that Biden had been unable to say in what year his son Beau had died.
Hur, it should be stressed, was taking Biden’s part. Trump was facing a major trial for having wrongly held on to confidential documents but Hur was reporting that no similar case against Biden should be pursued because of his poor memory. But Biden was so sensitive about any suggestion that his mental faculties were less than they ought to be, that on reading Hur’s report, he charged across to the little press room where journalists foregather in the White House in order to vent his anger against Hur. He was particularly furious that Hur had said that he, Biden, couldn’t remember the year of Beau’s death: “How in the hell dare he raise that !” Yet Hur was telling the truth.
As the pressure built for Biden to stand down, his anger grew. In his view Obama and the Clintons had unfairly deprived him of his presidential run in 2016. Had he run, he was sure he would have beaten Trump, in which case by 2024 he would be finishing his second term. And now it was the very same big shots in the Democratic Party who were trying to force him out.
The mess was made even worse because of Biden’s unfortunate pick of Kamala Harris as Vice President. This was done purely as a matter of identity politics. The key fact about Kamala is that she has both black and Asian parentage. Kamala owed her ascent in Californian politics entirely to her then boyfriend, Willie Brown, a somewhat slippery character of frequent interest to the law and order authorities. She flip flopped shamelessly on issues. When district attorney of San Francisco she campaigned against the death penalty. When she became Attorney General of California she campaigned in favour of it. Then when she campaigned for President in 2020 it quickly became clear that she knew very little about any of the leading issues so even on something as central as health care she flip flopped from one position to another. When she first declared she was running she had around 30% support (as any California politician is likely to have) but that figure steadily sank so that by the time she faced her first primary she was down to 8%. At which point she withdrew without ever facing the electorate.
If Joe Biden had stepped down in March (as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968) there is little likelihood that Kamala Harris would have succeeded him. There are many Democratic Senators and Governors who are far more talented than Kamala Harris and it is most unlikely that she would have beaten them in a series of primaries. She has got her party’s nomination simply because Biden clung on so long that there wasn’t time for due process to be observed. Democrats are so relieved that Biden did finally stand down that there is surprisingly little comment about the fact that Harris is running behind Trump in the polls. Similarly, there is such a tidal wave of gratitude to Biden for standing down that there is little comment about the prodigious mess in which he has landed his party.
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