As he enters the final month of his first and only presidential term, Joe Biden is speaking to history, emphasizing the positive side of his legacy while he can still command an audience.
Biden rightly boasts that he’s leaving his successor a strong economy — perhaps the best in the world. Inflation is under control, gas is down to $3 a gallon and the Federal Reserve has already sliced interest rates twice this fall.
Unemployment is holding steady at 4%, and Biden’s most enduring achievements — major investments in infrastructure upgrades, computer chip manufacturing and clean energy innovation — will generate economic vitality for years to come.
But one fact threatens to overshadow those positives and indelibly stain his reputation. Biden hands that economy over to Donald Trump, a man he repeatedly denounced as a profound threat to the foundations of democracy. And it was Biden, more than anyone else, who made Trump’s triumph possible.
As Democratic strategist David Plouffe puts it, the president committed the “cardinal sin” — running for a second term when his mental and physical decline was already well advanced, and then stubbornly refusing to quit the race until midsummer, so the party had no choice but to anoint Vice President Kamala Harris as candidate instead of holding a primary.
It was an act of supreme selfishness and self-delusion that doomed his party from the beginning. There’s no guarantee that a younger, fresher Democrat — especially a governor with no ties to Washington or a deeply unpopular president — could have beaten Trump. But they would have had a much better chance than Biden himself or his vice president, who could never escape her ties to the incumbent.
Franklin Foer, author of a book about the Biden White House, wrote in the Atlantic: “Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.”
That’s largely — but not completely — true. Biden has always been a union man focused on creating good-paying jobs for the working-class folks he grew up with in Scranton. And he’s entitled to chide his Republican foes who voted against his economic initiatives and now embrace the benefits they will produce.
“Some of my friends in the Republican Party … they’re against all the things we did. Keep your eye on them,” Biden said during a speech at the Brookings Institution about his economic legacy. “Tell me when they want the programs we voted for them to (be) cut in their states. Show me the most conservative Republicans willing to take away the factories that are going to be built in their states.
“Going to be interesting,” Biden said. “Going to be interesting.”
He even taunted Trump, who has vowed to roll back many of Biden’s policies: “Will the next president stop a new electric battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, that will create thousands of jobs? Will he shut down a new solar factory being built in Cartersville, Georgia? Are they going to do that?”
Here’s the problem: Notice that Biden says his programs “will create thousands of jobs” — but that’s in the future. His economic successes came too late to save his party politically, and how they will affect his legacy is still an open question.
There are other questions as well. Biden was good at creating jobs, but not joy; at encouraging industry, but not inspiration. He was handed a nation soaked in pandemic gloom that he was never able to dispel. On Election Day, 68% of voters viewed the economy negatively — and those pessimists went 70% to 28% for Trump.
Then there is his decision to pardon his son Hunter, who was facing jail time for tax- and gun-related crimes. Many parents could sympathize with Biden’s instinct to protect his child, but his real sin was not devotion, it was deception.
“The problem that President Biden has legacy-wise is he said he wouldn’t pardon his son,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told USA Today. “He gave his word, crossed his heart, and then alas, he ended up doing it.”
Judgments must be tentative as a president leaves office. History has a way of burnishing reputations as time goes by. Harry Truman is held in much greater esteem today than when he left office in 1952. Even many Democrats now grudgingly respect Ronald Reagan’s policy of peace through strength.
But as he departs, we know two things for sure about Biden: His economic policies have largely succeeded. And his political mistakes helped leave that economy to his worst enemy.