Joe Biden Didn’t Just Lose the White House. He Lost His Legacy.
What might have been a great chapter in the history books could be just a footnote.
By David Greenberg
01/18/2025 12:00 PM EST
President Joe Biden’s bid for historical greatness came to grief in one day: Nov. 5, 2024. Had he or Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential election and a second consecutive Democratic term, history probably would have cast Biden in a heroic light: as the man who returned America to normalcy after the chaos of Donald Trump’s first term; who got the nation back on its feet after the Covid-19 pandemic; who reasserted U.S. leadership in the world after a season of retreat; who rebuilt democracy after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault.
Instead, Biden is now apt to be recalled as a well-intentioned but only moderately effectual placeholder. He had several proud achievements but, owing to his brief tenure and his personal limitations, many of those achievements will likely be dismantled by the very man he believed he had exiled from the seat of power.
The problems were not just his advancing age and declining stamina, which finally became undeniable after the June 2024 debate fiasco that doomed his reelection bid. At bottom, it was also Biden’s habitual inability to size up and address a problem in full: He saw the need to goose the economy after the pandemic but failed to consider the perils of inflation; he came to the defense of Ukraine and Israel but didn’t anticipate the course those wars might take; he fervently believed that Trump threatened democracy but did little to reinforce the guardrails. Always a workhorse, never a visionary, Biden might have been an excellent president in a more placid time. But in the current crisis, which cried out for a Roosevelt, he was only a Biden.
more
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/18/biden-lost-white-house-legacy-00198231
