Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. should be remembered as a failed president, a cringy blowhard senator, perhaps the most shameless fabulist in American political history, the patriarch of a shady family, and a preternatural liar who couldn’t hold a single consistent principled position in his very long career.
Of course they’re going to try to canonize him.
Almost a week after breaking up with voters in a letter, Biden finally addressed the nation without bothering to explain why he abandoned the race. Doing so would have entailed admitting his declining mental and physical state. But, true to form, the president used the Oval Office, typically reserved for solemn or historic moments, to deliver another divisive partisan talk, insinuating that anyone who opposed Democrats was a threat to “democracy.”
Did the political media press the Biden camp on what the man had been doing the past week? Or what was said to him by Democrats to convince him to leave? No. They began writing hagiographies.
After the speech, the Biden family posed for some legacy-building shots, and the media took the bait. “A powerful photo. The hand toward his father’s face,” wrote Robert Costa of The Washington Post about one picture of Joe with his son, renowned artist Hunter Biden. “The eyes. Put aside politics and everything related for a moment, and viewed simply on a human level, you see two men, father and son, still at each other’s side, more than a half-century since the darkness of Dec. 18, 1972.”
Ah, the eyes. Get a grip, man.
This is not a normal thing for a political journalist to write. I’m not really here to judge the moral core of a politician — not even ones who refuse to acknowledge their inconvenient grandchildren for four years. But the job of a journalist isn’t to idealize those in power but to act as the Devil’s advocate.
Indeed, Costa’s emotional projection and myth-building are being transposed onto one of the biggest mediocrities ever to live in the White House.
“He’s done an unnatural thing — very rare in the annals of history — he stepped away from power and he did it in the interests of the country,” Democrat Party operative David Axelrod explained after Biden withdrew from the 2024 race. A “selfless act” was how virtually everyone on the left described the president’s bowing out.
I’m sorry, Cincinnatus wasn’t elbowed out of Rome by hedge funders and George Clooney. Biden stepped away from power because big donors closed their checkbooks, the media (which had been gaslighting us until the debate) turned on him, and every Democrat heavy hitter in the party asked him to leave. Cincinnatus, an exemplar of virtue and humility, returned to his modest farm — not a tony Rehoboth Beach home — by his own volition. The Bidens never sacrificed anything.
Of course, if Biden had put the cause of “democracy,” or even his own party’s fortunes, above his own, he would have stepped aside months ago so Democrats could have an open primary.
Then again, the story of Cincinnatus might be apocryphal, much like the story of Biden’s exemplary “public service” record. Because, really, is it “public service” if you go from being a middling lawyer to the patriarch of a family of shady influence-peddlers?
Biden has always been a .200-hitter trying to bat clean-up his whole life. He won his first Senate race in Delaware in the middle of Watergate, and only because Richard Nixon convinced incumbent J. Caleb Boggs to unretire and run. 1972 was the first Senate election in which 18-year-olds could vote, so Biden relentlessly attacked Boggs’ age (63). Thereafter, he basically ran for a House-sized congressional seat every six years until 2009.
In the Senate, Biden, by his own admission, spent a chunk of the ’70s sucking up to segregationists like James Eastland (“Voice of the White South”) and Herman Talmadge, so he could grab plum committee seats. Biden sought the praise of racist George Wallace — lied about it, actually — and worried about his kids being swallowed up in a “racial jungle.”
What a swell guy!
Biden had one of the most disastrous major presidential campaigns in American history in 1988 — where he was caught fabricating stories about his upbringing and education and insulting reporters who dared ask him questions about it. Joe not only lifted segments of speeches from John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey but also plagiarized an entire speech, nearly verbatim, from Welsh Labour politician Neil Kinnock because his own professional life was so uninspiring and unimpressive.
Even after being caught, he continued to share imaginary events.
The rest of his Senate career was spent zig-zagging and flip-flopping and lecturing people much smarter than he, while always landing exactly where the party was going. Biden helped turn once-civil Supreme Court confirmation hearings into smear-fests against conservative nominees. In 1986, the year before Biden became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Antonin Scalia had been approved 98–0 by the Senate. The next year, Biden smeared Robert Bork, sinking his nomination. A few years later, he was embarrassing himself explaining natural law to Clarence Thomas.
Biden would run for president again in 2008, famously calling Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” while coming in fifth place, winning less than 1 percent of the vote.
No one should bemoan the fact that a C-average student somehow stumbled into power. But if political success were driven by merit, Biden would finally have been thrown onto the political scrap heap, his undistinguished career slowly fading from history. Instead, Obama, anxious about being portrayed as a radical leftist by the GOP, went searching for the most non-threatening, sycophantic “moderate” he could dig up to fill the veep spot. Biden answered the call.
Joe was so bad at his job, Obama tried to discourage him from running for the presidency in 2020, reportedly telling people to “never to underestimate Joe’s ability to f-ck things up.”
Indeed, not even Biden could f-ck up the 2020 presidential election. With no viable alternatives, the Democrat Party establishment rallied around Joe when it looked like a septuagenarian Trotskyite named Bernie Sanders might win the nomination. Running his campaign from his den during a once-in-a-century epidemic, under the protection of Praetorian Guard press, Biden beat Donald Trump.
Biden quickly adopted every far-left position imaginable. His presidency was a disaster. Even before the debate, Biden was rightly behind on virtually every major issue in every poll. But he’s a Democrat. And Democrats fail upward, their legacies sanctified no matter how disgraceful and pathetic.
Biden is leaving. He’s an elderly man with a poor memory. Let him retire in peace. But don’t let them rewrite history.