Biden, who built career on perseverance, confronts its end

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s decision to stand down from his own re-election campaign marks a particularly frustrating conclusion for a man long convinced of his own ability to seal any deal.

Faced with cratering polls, disenchanted donors, and an apathetic electorate, no combination of Biden’s most celebrated attributes – charm, empathy, stubbornness – could overcome concern that his advancing age left him unable to defeat Donald Trump in November.

The painful irony, to the president’s supporters, is that his longevity and learned experience across five decades in national politics had seemed to work to his benefit in the presidency, up until it didn’t.

“He always believed there was a way to put together big deals,” said David Axelrod, chief strategist for the campaigns of President Barack Obama, who picked Biden as his running mate in 2008 in part based on his decades-long career in the Senate. “He’s not wrong: He has been historically productive in the most difficult circumstances.”

Biden will address the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, outlining his reasons for stepping aside and what he hopes to accomplish over the final six months of his presidency.

After four attempts at the White House, Biden departs the presidency after a single term. His time in office was marked by bold and pricey legislative efforts to confront new threats, like the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as attempts to shore up and expand policies first implemented by Obama and targeted by Trump, such as the Affordable Care Act. Biden conceded in recent weeks that he was surprised at how stubborn the nation’s political divides remained despite his efforts at national unity.

The scale of the administration’s earliest achievements would likely have seemed unimaginable during Biden’s previous stint in the executive branch, when he helped oversee delivery of the $800 billion Obama-era stimulus package aimed at combating the Great Recession. That effort was seen by many Democrats, upon passage and in the years since, as far smaller than it should have been.

Biden emerged in the 2020 Democratic primary as a centrist alternative to the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist who called for single-payer universal health care, cuts to military spending and aggressive action to combat climate change.

Though he fended off rivals to the left in the primary, Biden in office left a decidedly progressive mark, particularly on federal spending and the use of the government’s fiscal tools to bolster the social safety net amid the COVID crisis.

With congressional Democrats, he passed the American Rescue Plan months into his first year in office, a $1.9 trillion package of stimulus spending and support for social programs intended to blunt the economic effects of the pandemic. The following year brought the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions in new spending aimed at helping the country meet goals for reducing carbon emissions, speeding the electrification of the transportation system and strengthening Obama’s signature health care law.

Only objections from moderates within the Senate’s Democratic caucus, which ultimately foiled the more aggressive Build Back Better plan, kept Biden and congressional leaders from going even bigger.

Neither the policy goals nor the politics should have come as a surprise, according to Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“The roots of this really were quite visible in his time as vice president, and that his governing really did reflect his campaign,” she said. “He cares a lot about bottom-up middle-out economics – that is Joe Biden from Scranton.”

While Trump and Republicans have peeled off some union members with appeals to economic populism — including by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to address the Republican National Convention earlier this month — the labor movement’s leaders have remained largely behind Biden. Unions have cited both policy — like including labor standards and union-friendly language in some of the administration’s largest legislative initiatives — and personnel.

“Joe Biden has been the most pro-union president in our lifetimes,” said Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO. “There hasn’t been a president that’s been more empowering of workers and interested in expanding the labor movement.”

The Biden administration has employed regulators and Cabinet officials pressing unusually pro-worker policies, Shuler said, including by accounting for the needs of American workers in areas like trade and environmental regulation.

Global conflicts

On foreign policy, Biden prided himself as an expert dating back to his days on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But his administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a tactical and political disaster. The images of Taliban fighters retaking control of the capital, coupled with the fallout from a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians, were a vision of miscalculation from which the administration never fully recovered.

Biden’s appeals to multinational institutions served him well as he courted allies to hold firm against Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping Ukraine avert total capture after an invasion many expected would quickly take Kyiv. But Biden struggled to compel an increasingly isolationist Republican Party to continue sending critical military aid, leaving a bloody stalemate in place in the conflict.

And while the president drew praise from Israeli officials for his embrace of the country and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, the ensuing war in Gaza — and mounting humanitarian toll — split the Democratic Party. For months, Biden’s own political fate has been dogged by outrage at civilian deaths and famine-like conditions, and what many on the left say is the U.S. government’s complicity in it.

All along, the unavoidable was happening for Biden. The insurgent turned wise old hand turned again, this time into an undeniably old man.

Biden entered national politics a youthful upstart, not yet old enough to be seated in the Senate on the day he upset Republican Cale Boggs in 1972. Biden turned 30, the U.S. Constitution’s minimum age to serve in the Senate, later that fall. But Biden and the “Watergate Baby” Democrats who followed him into Congress two years later are steadily aging out of power in Washington.

On the day Biden won his first Senate election, some of the other winning candidates had been born in the 19th century. Today, other than Biden, only two of them are still alive.

Uncertain legacy

Though the candidate and some of his campaign staff had rejected the findings, polls consistently showed age posed a multifaceted threat to Biden’s re-election chances: voters worried he was too old, and people too young to remember him as an avatar of youth and change were unenthusiastic about his candidacy.

That led Biden this month to do what would have seemed unthinkable just weeks earlier: a last-minute hand-off of his party’s mantle to Vice President Kamala Harris. His presidential legacy — sought for decades, crafted over four grueling years — will now be determined in large part by the result of an unprecedented sprint to Nov. 5, as Biden watches from the sidelines.

Democratic political operatives crowed this week about fresh voter enthusiasm for the new ticket, with Harris at center stage and Biden at home in Delaware, recuperating from Covid and mostly silent. Harris drew a large, boisterous crowd to her first presidential campaign rally in the critical city of Milwaukee. Campaign contributions soared past the $100 million mark. Memes bloomed. Volunteers signed up.

The Democratic Party has little margin for error in pivoting to rally voters for Harris and against Trump, and little time to course-correct if their new candidate, whose own 2020 bid collapsed before voting even began, struggles on the trail.

Axelrod said that Biden’s decision to step aside would allow the public to appreciate his legislative achievements, including those like infrastructure spending that will take years to come to fruition.

“He committed an unnatural act for a politician: he gave up power,” Axelrod said Tuesday. From what had increasingly seemed to be a political dead-end, one of Biden’s last acts had been to open a lane to a potential victory for Harris.