How will history assess President Biden?
Mired with low approval ratings, the president said this week he believes history will be kinder: “You know, it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said in his Oval Office farewell address this week. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”
Over the course of his four years, Mr. Biden has invited comparisons to the policies and ambition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. He has said John F. Kennedy partially inspired his life of public service. Roosevelt’s portrait hangs over the Oval Office fireplace with paintings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Their achievements, triumphs and public words are the kind most commanders-in-chief would emulate.
There’s no doubt Mr. Biden did big things to reshape the country and the world. History may show he saved American democracy from grave threats — or maybe, time will show us he merely slowed them. History will also record that he failed to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, but united western democracies against the unprovoked invasion and expanded key military alliances.
He began an overdue and more pronounced shift in American attention to the Indo-Pacific, fortifying and expanding agreements with China’s neighbors, kept lines of communication open with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but failed to stop China’s aggressive spy craft and an unprecedented infiltration of American telecommunications systems.
As president, Mr. Biden immediately pushed for what became a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, including direct aid to lower-income Americans, record sums of unemployment benefits, hundreds of billions for states and cities to reopen and rebuild and tens of billions of dollars sent to small businesses, like barber shops and bars, to stay open and keep workers paid.
Later, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill authorized hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild airports, bridges and highways, billions more to build a network of electric vehicle chargers and more broadband Internet. Finally, the Inflation Reduction Act launched record spending to fight climate change and tax reform — even if its namesake goal, to reduce inflation, remains unfulfilled.
So, does that work put Biden on par with FDR and LBJ? Progressive Democrats think so, and his Republican critics certainly revile the kind of expansive legislative work Mr. Biden achieved — and are vowing to undo much of it.
But history might also compare him to two other presidents.
First, George H.W. Bush, another exceptionally experienced public servant and political operative who rose to the presidency after a two-term stint as vice president. He was a president who worked to reshape the global order in the wake of the end of the Cold War, yet struggled to explain and defend them once it came time for reelection. Coming off sky-high approval ratings, his 1992 reelection sputtered amid an economic downturn. Bush also suffered from the perception that he was out of touch with everyday Americans, particularly after an encounter with a supermarket scanner. He was no match for the skillful campaigning of opponent Bill Clinton, who better understood a candidate needed to spend time on late-night and daytime television talk shows and be comfortable fielding questions about his underwear choices on MTV in order to win.
History has been kinder to the elder Bush, and he’s placed among the most qualified ever to serve.
Voters may also place Mr. Biden in a two-man league alongside a lesser-known predecessor: Benjamin Harrison.
In office from 1889 to 1893, he served between the terms of Grover Cleveland, making Harrison the answer to the weekly pub trivia question, “Who is the other president who served in between two non-consecutive terms of another?”
But Mr. Biden might not mind the comparison, because Harrison is known for reshaping U.S. foreign policy with new global alliances. He worked with Congress to approve what was then the largest amount of money ever spent on domestic infrastructure. And he used the levers of the federal government to restrain corporate monopolies.
Harrison was also the first president to mount a “front porch campaign,” where he’d deliver short speeches to delegations of voters who came to his Indianapolis home.
Now, he’s really sounding like Mr. Biden — once the COVID-19 pandemic set in, the president retreated to his Wilmington, Delaware, residence and delivered short speeches over Zoom as he shored up his party’s nomination, and later even conducted live television interviews from a basement studio. When he ventured out, it was mostly to campaign at a safe distance while battleground state voters watched — and honked — from their vehicles, as if attending a live-action drive-in movie.
Then-President Donald Trump griped that Mr. Biden was getting away with his more passive campaign strategy, but it worked.
But four years later, coming off healthy approval ratings at the start, Mr. Biden’s reelection sputtered amid an economic downturn and the skillful campaigning of his opponent, Trump, who better understood a candidate needed to spend time on podcasts, and TikTok and be seen at large public events to win.
It led to a remarkably candid self-assessment from Mr. Biden during an interview that aired Thursday night on MSNBC. Asked about how he sold his early legislative wins to the country, and the decision to keep his name off COVID-era relief checks sent to low-income Americans, the president said, “I’m not a very good huckster. … I almost spent too much time on the policy, not enough time on the politics.”
That self-reflection invites perhaps the most painful comparisons for Biden, in a class with predecessors like James A. Garfield and Kennedy. The “What if?” Class: What if they’d had more time, survived, been healthier to serve longer?
Garfield died roughly two months after an assassin’s bullet couldn’t be removed from his body and infected him. And of course, Kennedy’s assassination 1,036 days into his term cut short a generational hope for a new kind of leadership.
Mr. Biden vowed during his 2020 campaign to be a bridge to the next generation – a subtle, but not explicit signal he’d bow out after one term. His ultimate decision has been well documented and will be vigorously debated for decades to come: What if he’d bowed out? What if there’d be an open Democratic Party primary – would Vice President Harris have won?
We will never know.
