Biden’s legacy: A one-term president’s tumultuous exit

Mere days from now, on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, Joseph Robinette Biden, 82, will end his one-term in office as president of the United States, leaving behind a complex legacy as a politician who began his ascent in politics as a 27-year-old elected to a Delaware County Council seat, followed by his election three years later as the youngest senator in US history and finally, after his third try at it, his election as president of the United States, the highest office in the land and surely the apex of power that any politician could aspire to have.

In the 2020 presidential election, after the four years Donald Trump spent in the White House, many Americans took a chance on Joe Biden when he made his bid to run for president at age 78.

Many others, truth be told, cast their ballots for the man not with the expectation that he would guide them, as it were, to a new dawn — Biden was too pedestrian a politician and his view of the world too prosaic for that — but to avoid the wanton chaos, the nativist venom and the often bizarre policies of his predecessor.

This columnist wrote a glowing piece about the earthy qualities of the incoming president, praising his inauguration speech, suffused as it seemed to have been with moral optimism about the future, a piece that echoed the thoughts of many Democrats like himself. Biden, we knew, was not going to be a great president, but surely, we argued, he would be at least a good president.

He was not. Not by a stretch.

Cognitive decline

Despite his flagging approval ratings throughout his presidency — ratings triggered in part by his failure to curb inflation and address the migration crisis, not to mention his signature foreign policy failure early in his tenure, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 — and mounting evidence of his cognitive decline, which reporters who covered him revealed to readers but his senior aides hid from the public, the octogenarian president was insistent that he and only he could defeat Trump.

Then, on June 27, came that infamous presidential debate, the one that we all watched aghast; the one that decades on will continue to rank, for Democrats, as the most humiliating in the history of all the other televised debates that preceded it, including that in September 1960 between President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy (the first ever televised) that effectively changed the course of American history; the one where the presidential aspirant, who had had the odds stacked against him in the campaign, looked, during the debate, suave, composed and self-assured, while the incumbent looked nervous, unwell, and sweaty under the hot studio lights.

In American politics, reality is about optics and how that, often subliminally, affects perception.

For President Biden it was not just the optics of it, although that indubitably played a part, but the incoherence of it that did him in, and that virtually then and there drove Democrats, feeling as they did anguished and humiliated at the spectacle, to doubt their presumptive nominee’s ability to lead them to victory.

There is Biden on the stage, standing eight feet away from ex-president Donald Trump, looking pale and sounding hoarse, jumbling his words and, in one gaffe, while attacking his opponent on the national debt, he ended his remarks by bizarrely saying: “And we finally defeated Medicare”. Trump, you will recall, pounced, saying dismissively, “I don’t know what he’s talking about”, paradoxically echoing the thoughts of millions of viewers, including Democrats among them.

The 28 days between that disaster and Biden’s drop out — he dropped out, under pressure from the big honchos of his party, only 107 days before Election Day — were chaotic, leaving his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, with an abysmal record as a short-lived presidential candidate.

Then, of course, there was Biden’s unpardonable, morally bankrupt stance on Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

There he is duplicitously talking, on the one hand, about how the Zionist state “has not done enough” to meet its duty under international law to not block (as it did then and continues to do today) the delivery of humanitarian aid to starving Gazans and how it had “gone over the top” in its ferocious campaign to kill Gazan civilians; and on the other providing that same Israel with all — all! — the weapons it needed to continue with that campaign.

The only charitable thing that can be said about the legacy that Joseph Robinette Biden will leave behind is this: As the case of the late President Jimmy Carter would attest, presidents seen as failures in their time in office can, in later years, in the cold light of hindsight, be recognised generously.

Too charitable an assessment, you say?

Watch this columnist nod in agreement.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.