Biden Withdraws: The Final Twist in a Surprisingly Great Presidency

Like a lot of the Washington press corps, for a long time I got Joe Biden wrong. Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race this weekend, as was necessary due to growing evidence of small but worrying age-related infirmities. But as Biden exits, let’s not forget that Biden leaves behind a remarkably strong record on which his Democratic successor will run. Biden has not just been a good president—he has been a transformative one. Which I find no small surprise, having once written him off as a politician with a lot more ambition than talent.

In 1988, when I was a reporter at Newsweek, I spent an afternoon at a Syracuse University alumni office searching for law school classmates who could tell me what a lousy student Biden was there. His candidacy for president was in free fall after it had been revealed that Biden, when speaking about being the first in his family to attend college plagiarized the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift subsequently found a 1987 c-span snippet in which Biden claimed to have attended law school on an academic scholarship (untrue); graduated in the top half of his class (untrue); and was named “the outstanding student in the political science department” (untrue). My job was to furnish more detail for Clift’s story, but before I could get very far Biden withdrew from the race. The widely-shared conclusion, to which I subscribed, was that Biden was too much of a lightweight and a phony ever to become president.

Four years later I’d moved on to The Wall Street Journal, where I was assigned to cover the final day of the Judiciary Committee hearings examining claims by Anita Hill that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas committed sexual harassment while chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which quite obviously he had. All doubts vanished when—past midnight, if I remember right—committee staffers dropped into reporters’ laps an affidavit from a second accuser named Angela Wright. But the Judiciary Committee, which Biden chaired, did not allow Wright to testify. “We could go on legitimately for another 10 days,” Biden said at the hearing, “seeking out corroborators of corroborators, seeking out additional information, further investigating. This is not a luxury that we have.” I thought: What a schmuck.

Biden ran again in 2008, this time blurting out that his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Articulate was bad; it’s the stereotypical white person’s term of condescension for any African American who can string three words together. Clean was worse. And Biden’s suggestion (accidental, I presume) that never before had a “mainstream African American” presented himself suitably to the voting public was outright racist. Biden tanked in Iowa and quit the race. Later, when it was reported that Obama was considering Biden for his running mate, I bet a colleague at Slate $20 that this would never happen. Biden was too much of a liability. I lost that bet.

Then Biden became vice president, and—wonder of wonders—turned out to be an excellent choice because he possessed a gift that Obama lacked for negotiating with recalcitrant members of Congress. By now I was writing the “TRB From Washington” column for this magazine. In a 2012 column headlined “Second Thoughts” (subhead: “The surprising non-embarrassment that is Joe Biden”), I observed that although Biden could match, gaffe for gaffe, former Vice President Dan Quayle and former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, he turned out to possess a magic touch in dealing with foreign leaders and unruly legislators “Biden is not a stupid man,” I wrote. “Biden is a smart man who says stupid things.”

Even so, Obama passed over Biden in 2016 and gave his endorsement instead to Hillary Clinton. That seemed the obvious choice at the time. It is now generally agreed that had Obama endorsed Biden instead, and had Biden consequently secured the nomination, Donald Trump would never have become president. Whoops.

In 2020 Biden ran against Trump and beat him. Trump had made such a mess of the Covid epidemic that Biden’s victory wasn’t particularly surprising. The surprise came after Biden entered the White House, where Biden demonstrated enormous political gifts. As Franklin Foer, a former editor of this magazine, observed in his 2023 book The Last Politician: “He was a man for his age.”

Biden’s greatest accomplishments as president were confined mostly to his first two years, because that was when he had a Democratic House and Senate. But his Senate majority was so narrow—48 Democrats plus two independents who caucused with Democrats plus one tie-breaking vice-president—that it’s a wonder Biden got anything done at all. Two of the Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, were scarcely Democrats at all (and, indeed, ended up becoming independents, though they continued to caucus with Democrats). Both were given to conservative posturing, and on big administration priorities Manchin in particular was infuriatingly difficult to pin down. 

Yet Biden managed to push through Congress a remarkable series of game-changing spending bills:

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. This was, the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond observed, “the most important intervention the federal government has made in the lives of low-income Americans since the great society,” including a refundable child tax credit that “reduced child poverty to its lowest rate in U.S. history.” The refundable credit represented a significant change in social policy, weaning Congress off culture-of-poverty arguments that forbade no-strings federal assistance. The refundable credit expired at the end of 2021, but there’s a realistic hope that some version of it will be resurrected.

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Infrastructure spending isn’t particularly novel, which is why this bill received bipartisan support. But the scale of Biden’s bill was ambitious in a way the country hadn’t seen, arguably, since the New Deal. It dwarfed Obama’s $48 billion 2009 Recovery Act and Obama’s $305 billion follow-up infrastructure bill in 2015. Trump, of course, proved unequal to moving an infrastructure bill at all, even though for two years he enjoyed House and Senate majorities larger than Biden’s.

The $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA was the largest investment in green technology in U.S. history, and represented a paradigm shift in prioritizing the carrot of spending over the stick of punitive taxation. Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument in his 2024 book The Road to Freedom that the stick remains more efficient from an economic point of view, but after years of trying to persuade Congress to apply the stick, Democrats concluded that climate change’s urgency compelled them to make the perfect the enemy of the good and use the carrot instead.

The $280 billion CHIPS Act. For decades, Washington dithered over whether it was all right for the government to “pick winners and losers” through an industrial policy. A decade ago, the Solyndra scandal, which involved a $535 million government loan guarantee to a company that went bankrupt, persuaded many Democrats that industrial policy was just too risky. But the supply-chain nightmare of the Covid years altered that calculus, allowing the Biden administration to pass, with Republican support, a bill to return semiconductor production to the United States and expand the country’s investment in research and development. 

Biden nursed Obamacare back to financial health after Trump and congressional Republicans tried to starve it to death, bringing the percentage of uninsured Americans down from about 10 percent when Biden entered office to about 8 percent today.  He also pushed through Congress (in the IRA) a law that finally granted Medicare, two decades after creation of its drug benefit, the power it needed to negotiate the prices of those drugs. And he capped the price of insulin, which had been skyrocketing for a decade, at $35 per month for Medicare recipients. Nearly one-third of all people over 65 have diabetes.

Biden is the most pro-union president since Harry Truman. During his first month in office he nominated Jennifer Abruzzo to be general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, where she persuaded the NLRB, in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, that if an employer committed a labor violation during an NLRB-supervised union election, then that employer should be compelled to recognize the union, election or no election. Writing in The American Prospect, Harold Myerson called it the most important NLRB ruling “in many decades.”

In foreign policy, Biden can be faulted for failing to do all he could (namely, stop all non-defensive weapons shipments) to prevent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from pulverizing Gaza as mounting Palestinian deaths (now about 39,000, most of them civilians) began to displace Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,189 Israelis (again, most of them civilians) as the most urgent human rights concern in the region. This is an area where Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, demonstrated greater political courage than Biden in challenging Israel. But Biden’s supply of military aid to Ukraine very effectively balanced conflicting imperatives to constrain Russian expansionism while avoiding dangerous provocation of the Kremlin. Biden is right to boast (as he does frequently) that he brought Sweden and Finland into the same North Atlantic Treaty Organization that Trump keeps threatening to leave.

How did Biden achieve all these things? Did he change? I think that the aging process, by slowing Biden down a bit, made him a much better decisionmaker than when he was young, glib, and overconfident. Biden frequently mentions that age brought him greater wisdom, and that seems true. But aging eventually slowed Biden down to the point where its liabilities outweighed its benefits. After initially resisting this unpleasant reality, Biden seems now to be on a path to recognizing it. The same aging process that ripened Biden into a transformative and highly effective chief executive now erodes his ability to win another term. It’s a sad irony. 

But as Democrats scout a candidate to take Biden’s place in these final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, they can be grateful that he gives them an unusually strong four-year record of accomplishments to run on. Biden, near the end of an unusually long career in politics, became one of our better presidents, ranking below Franklin Roosevelt but above nearly every president who followed him. A lot of us never imagined such a thing was possible. Biden set us straight. Thank you, Mr. President, for using your last act to make fools of your detractors.