Biden Lost His Voice, Then His Power

In most respects, President Joseph R. Biden is a thoroughly conventional president — a leader deeply respectful of precedent, a man whose style and values are shaped by living through more than half of the 20th century even as he ends his career navigating the disruptive politics of the 21st.

By contrast, the great foil of his presidency — predecessor Donald Trump — is in style and contempt for precedent the most radical person ever to hold the office.

Biden’s Oval Office address Wednesday night, however, underlined a paradox. There is one way that Trump represents continuity and Biden is the anomaly. This paradox is also the reason Biden won’t be his party’s nominee for a second term.

For most of American history — certainly since the start of the 20th century — the presidency has taken much of its power from the ability of its occupants to communicate. In other words, to use the singular power of the Oval Office to command the attention of the nation — more or less at will, on any topic or occasion — and shape the thoughts and mood of the country through the power of words and image. There is no better place to wage a national argument.

By this narrow but critical standard, it is Trump who used the presidential pulpit — and the mania and obsessive interest that followed him even after he lost it — in ways consistent with the grain of American history. He preoccupies the psyche of the nation, no less among those who loathe him as among the half or nearly half who are open to returning him to power.

It was Biden who is the tragic exception. He has been essentially a half president.

He has carried out the programmatic portion of the presidency — presiding over far-reaching legislation and aggressively using the policymaking tools of the executive branch — as effectively as any president in recent decades.

On the performative dimension of the presidency — using words to inspire his supporters, box in his enemies, to reframe debates — he has been arguably the weakest Oval Office occupant in more than a century, back to the days before television or even radio, when most Americans might read about a presidential speech but had never heard the president’s voice.

At the start of his presidency Biden’s voice was often inarticulate, except in a few grand set-piece speeches. (Many were written with influence by historian and former journalist Jon Meacham.) Now, at the end of his presidency, his voice has grown ever fainter, and a growing number of his thoughts straddle a line between discursive and incoherent.

There is yet more paradox here. Biden across his career has plainly wanted to be known as an exciting speaker, skilled in the theater of politics. Like most Democrats of his generation, he grew up venerating the Kennedys and aspiring to their example — a bust of Robert Kennedy was visible in the backdrop of his Oval Office speech. His first run for the presidency ended, in 1987, when it was revealed that he had cribbed high-flown phrases of his stump speech from British politician Neil Kinnock.

For much his career he was known not for turning down interviews and extemporaneous speaking but for treasuring his own voice. A Democratic operative recounted the times Biden would speechify to an empty Senate floor. It was impossible for the sole leadership aide in attendance to shuffle papers or work his phone because Biden had locked eyes on him — craving attention, demanding an audience.

In terms of power, and Biden’s inability to retain it, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Biden’s faltering voice now, at age 81, is due to dangerous age-related decline or something more benign. The gap was a decisive limitation of his presidency.

Biden sympathizers — even, or especially, those who were relieved he gave up the nomination he won earlier this year in an all-but-uncontested race — lavished praise on his speech Wednesday night and some predicted it will help enshrine his legacy for years to come.

Maybe so, but that legacy will likely be defined by the same contradictions that were on display in the brief Oval Office address. He said he was giving up the race for the second term that was merited by the achievements of his first because he needed to unify his party and that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy” from the dangers of Trump.

But a president who was effective at waging a national argument and reframing debates to his advantage would not be facing a potent threat from the same politician he beat in the last election. Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer know that the most likely way Trump would be in position to undermine democracy is by not by stealing an election but by decisively winning it, while also carrying his party to full control of Congress.

Even if people liked the words in Biden’s speech, it was replete with reminders of the president’s weakened capacity to wage argument. Even with scripted remarks, there were noticeable halts and restarts in several sentences, or words that lacked crisp enunciation. A stiff and almost cotton-mouthed delivery at the beginning did warm up steadily to a more forceful close.

But there was little in the performance to make his skeptics in the party fear, “Did we act too hastily to push him out?” or make ordinary voters wonder, “What’s wrong with his aides?! Why have they been sheltering him from interviews and more impromptu events?”

Early in his term, as he was passing major spending packages to stimulate the economy from the wake of the pandemic shutdowns, build new infrastructure and invest in a post-carbon economy, there were comparisons between Biden and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Those seem distant now, even as Biden leaves with more legislative milestones in one term than many presidents get in two.

Biden surely knows the wisdom of what FDR said during his first presidential campaign: “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

To reach this standard requires employing all tools of the modern presidency, not just half.