Joe Biden began his national political career in 1972, when he improbably unseated a Republican senator in Delaware at the age of 29. Biden was so young that he was elected before he was constitutionally old enough to serve in the Senate. He turned 30 on November 20 of that year, allowing him to take the seat in early 1973.
He ended his career on Sunday, some 52 years later, as the oldest president in American history, a man forced to withdraw from a reelection campaign less than four months before voters went to the polls by leaders of his own party, who determined that his state, home to elderly people, made him unelectable. The weekend timing may have been a surprise, but the exit was inevitable.
In short, Biden had lost the support of the vast majority of his party and, crucially, also of those who enrich its coffers.
Both William Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks excelled at writing tragedies, and Joe Biden’s story falls into a tradition that goes back thousands of years. The brash upstart becomes the arrogant old lion who doesn’t realize his time is up and is forced, under the hot spotlight, to suffer a humiliating end to his public life story. He becomes part Oedipus and part King Lear, howling in rage at a perceived injustice that is actually the fruit of his own mortality.
So what are we to make of America’s 46th president now that his ill-considered initial choice to run has left his party in total disarray as he once again faces a rising Donald Trump, a presidential candidate Democrats fear and loathe?
In many ways, this spectacular miscalculation reflects the Joe Biden that Americans of a certain age have long known.
He is a man who has repeatedly made mistakes, sometimes serious ones, and has made many other bad decisions.
His first bid for the presidency in 1988 collapsed after credible allegations of plagiarism surfaced in a speech he gave. His leadership as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, in which he downplayed sexual harassment allegations against Anita Hill, a former aide to Thomas, was a notable stain on his record for which he later apologized. He voted against President George H. W. Bush’s war on Iraq in 1991 and for President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq in 2002. With the benefit of hindsight, most would say those votes should have been reversed.
In short, while Biden has been a man endowed with the political appeal of empathy from working-class voters who often decide presidential elections, he has not always been a great decision-maker.
That was the case in April 2023, when Biden announced he would run for reelection. Even then, there were questions about his age, which mounted rapidly. By late last year, polls were showing age as an acute vulnerability for Biden. And evidence of his decline — to the extent that Americans were allowed to glimpse it given the White House’s obvious efforts to shield Biden from embarrassing “old age moments” — was there for all to see.
The party — and, let’s be honest, some partisans in the media — chided Americans for questioning Biden’s resilience and evident weakening. Biden pressed on, confident in his belief that the election would hinge on Americans’ desire not to relive the chaotic Trump era, rather than on his record and, more importantly, his clear ability to do the job for another four years.
He made a mistake, as we all know now. It was the biggest mistake of his career.
As Democrats move to determine their presidential standard-bearer under the most stringent of deadlines, Biden’s overall legacy will remain up for debate. Time may be more kind than most Democrats feel at a time when Biden has not made things easy for his party.
Of course, there were plenty of positive moments. His one term was a welcome return to a presidency in which Americans didn’t have to think virtually every day about what the occupier did or said. He worked hard — and ultimately successfully — to secure continued U.S. support for Ukraine in its existential battle with Russia. And, to his credit, he remained true to his long-held principles when it came to supporting Israel, if not always its current administration.
Biden also rightly points to a decent economic record, marked by substantial job growth and a bullish stock market. Harsh post-pandemic inflationary pressures weighed on Americans’ economic fortunes, and Biden could do little to rein them in or convince the public that things were better than polls showed. He was not the first president to be hurt by inflation, and he won’t be the last.
As vice president, Biden was an able and wise counselor to Barack Obama and an indispensable administration emissary to his former colleagues on Capitol Hill. Black voters have not forgotten that the veteran senator who took office when Obama was just 11 agreed to play second fiddle to the nation’s first black president, and they have become perhaps Biden’s last wall of support since he outrageously bungled his debate with Trump more than three weeks ago.
It is no small irony, then, that it was Obama who helped dissuade Biden from running to succeed him in 2016, and who instead decided to support Hillary Clinton. Since then, Democrats, including Biden, have wondered whether the country would have been spared from Trump if Obama had made another choice. It may well have been.
Biden’s life story is one of uncommon resilience.
He nearly resigned from his new Senate seat after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, but he eventually pushed on, traveling by train from the capital to Wilmington, Delaware, so he could care for his two children who survived the crash.
But as in such timeless tragedies, Biden’s belief that the only answer to setbacks and losses was to “get back up,” in his words, ultimately failed him.
Unfortunately, there is no way to overcome the ravages of age, which come at different times to different people and do so without regard for their merits.
At some point towards the end, determination and tenacity are no longer enough. The trick is knowing when to walk away from the stage and having the courage to know that the right moment is probably the one when you still feel far from finished in your own head.
The compensation for our physical and cognitive decline as we age is the wisdom acquired during all those years.
Biden thought experience could defeat Trumpism and fool Father Time. As he exits the political arena, both mythologies remain.
