Joe Biden is skulking away from the presidency as furtively as he entered and occupied it. In 2020, he campaigned from his basement, for fear of Covid; he governed in unprecedented isolation from the press and the public, like a gerontocrat in a García Márquez novel. It has been quite some time since the president has managed a sustained public interaction without a teleprompter. An imposture of some kind has been perpetrated. To leave a farewell tweet on the voting public’s refrigerator door is a fitting end to Biden’s career, but it indicates something disturbing about our system that goes beyond Biden.
The papers are now full of sycophantic tributes to Biden’s statesmanship and far-seeing wisdom. “I write to remind you of your true greatness as a leader,” ran the open letter Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) published last weekend, his contribution to the all-out pressure campaign mounted by virtually all the party’s top “donors and electeds,” as Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain calls them. Yet Biden did not choose to leave because he “put his country over his personal ambition,” as a dozen columnists now claim. No. A bit like Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Biden has governed in such a way as to put his party on track for a historic electoral whupping. Johnson, though, could still read polls well enough to make the decision himself. Biden was constrained to depart by the threat of an outright donors’ strike.
And that was that. Biden needed his party’s base of finance and tech billionaires—he would never have prevailed in 2020 without them. Political talent he had—above all, an ability to figure out the majority position on almost any issue. But he has never been a clear thinker or strategist. He was a poor debater even in his prime, who struggled to score a draw against Sarah Palin in the vice-presidential debate of 2008. In the end, the need to limit his exposure to debates forced him into his fatal mistake: proposing a front-loaded schedule that included two debates instead of the usual three, his retreat hopefully disguised with the release in May of a truculent, debate-me-if-you-dare video challenge. Vintage Biden: One day, that video may run in a loop in the ticket hall of the Joseph R. Biden Presidential Library.
In his 1988 and 2008 campaigns, Biden gave no hint of presidential timber. His ambitions wildly outran his abilities. It’s still that way. Last winter, 40 percent of Democrats told pollsters they wished they could vote for someone else. That needn’t be fatal—the same was once true of George W. Bush and Republicans.
And the 2020 election was special. It did not require presidential timber. It required somebody who was not Donald Trump—but party strategists hoped that that somebody would not be too far to the left, either. Biden’s moderation recommended him as a stronger potential challenger to Trump than Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But Democratic voters didn’t like him any better than they had before. They relegated him to fourth place in Iowa, fifth place in New Hampshire, and second place in Nevada, far behind Sanders.
It took an intervention of the 21st-century equivalent of party bosses to make Biden even appear plausible. In South Carolina, where a majority of the party’s primary voters are black, the endorsement of House majority whip James Clyburn was sufficient to secure a victory. As soon as Biden had won the state, his moderate rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer cleared the field for him and gave him their endorsement. Michael Bloomberg soon followed. Biden won 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday—but in only five of them did his newly consolidated establishment candidacy outpoll the combined progressive vote of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Biden turned out to be the right candidate for that cycle, but it took the most old-fashioned, party-driven, “gamed” nomination process since the 1950s to get him across the finish line.
“Biden campaigned as a moderate, but he didn’t govern as one.”
Biden campaigned as a moderate, but he didn’t govern as one. The Democrats are the party of new elites, new values, and rapid demographic change. What Democrats really needed was not a moderate, but a face of moderation that could be presented to swing voters the party risked scaring off. That was complicated.
Biden turned out to be the greatest gift to progressive political activists in half a century: He probably was a moderate at this point, but, in fact, he was not all there. The very need to pull together a varied coalition to defeat Trump in 2020 required Biden to make unusually large accommodations to every wing of his party. The model was the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force launched in the heart of the campaign. For the hawks he was a hawk, for the woke he was woke, for the greens he was green. Clyburn’s price for getting the ball rolling was a black woman on the Supreme Court.
After inauguration day, everyone could demand everything. There was no check on the ambitions of DEI, BLM, or ESG. They all got billions. There were hundreds of billions for students who had taken out college loans—at least, until the Supreme Court ruled Biden’s plan unconstitutional. There were hundreds of billions for those who wanted to continue America’s wars for “democracy” in Ukraine and elsewhere. And there were trillions for the industries from which Biden’s backers came: green energy, finance, and tech, above all. These, as it happens, include the donors who wound up pushing Biden out.
It was the Democrats with causes who loved Biden best. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Silicon Valley progressive Ro Khanna—they never had it so good, so it makes sense that these were the only Democrats who stuck with Biden till the bitter end. These voices make up the chorus that you can read in many newspapers proclaiming Biden an especially great president. He is not. He is a profligate president. That is where the inflation that set the tone for his presidency came from.
Whether or not Biden was toppled in a donors’ “coup,” as Sen. Marco Rubio called it, it was at the very least a donors’ strike. For all their claims to be skeptical of unfettered capitalism, America’s progressive elites behave like the robber barons in Atlas Shrugged. Biden claimed the will of primary voters had been flouted, but he didn’t have a leg to stand on: Biden ran unopposed this time around only because donor ruthlessness ensured that no respectable Democratic challenger could mount a serious primary campaign. For the first time in more than a century, the power of money is such that even the president cannot stand up to it.
With time, Democrats would have been able to sit down and consider whom they would ideally wish to send into battle against Trump. At this stage, only Kamala Harris can play that role. The convention delegates have already been awarded, and almost all are Biden loyalists. For Biden to have picked anyone but his veep could have led the party’s interest groups to begin embarrassing negotiations over spoils that would best be left till after the elections. Harris’s nomination permits the easy transfer of campaign funds, too; simply disbanding the Biden campaign would have required reimbursing all donors.
Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign was such a screwup that it is easy to underestimate her. She was charming, endowed with a huge network of California activists, and loaded with Hollywood and Silicon Valley money. Yet as soon as she started meeting voters and contesting debates, she began dropping precipitously in the polls, and she was out of the race before the Iowa caucuses. “This is my third presidential campaign,” Harris’s Maryland state-operations director said in a resignation letter back then, “and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.”
Harris has been much mocked for occasionally saying goofy things. But she is not stupid, and in Senate hearings, she has proved a capable partisan jouster. It is worth considering why she seemed such a promising candidate on paper. Democratic coalitions have a standing problem: Their party relies for money on the kingpins of the information economy and for votes on blacks, LGBTs, immigrants, and others who depend on civil-rights laws. Very few people are comfortable dealing with both these groups. Harris is—even if she is not the master that Barack Obama was.
If Biden is not up to the technical task of communicating his program to voters, Republicans have begun asking, then how can he continue in the considerably more arduous task of running the country? This question rests on an outdated conception of the presidency. The heart of Bidenism lies in managing entitlements to the satisfaction of civil-rights lobbies and the economy to the satisfaction of tech and finance moguls. With an election approaching, that balancing act is breaking down, which is about what one would expect. It’s mostly a hidden job. Aides can manage it. Justifying such a system to skeptical voters requires more agility. That’s the part of the job that Biden lacked the vigor to carry out.