Biden's legacy: a summary

Why the best President of my lifetime might get misremembered as a bumbling caretaker.

Photo by Biden For President, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Joe Biden announced today that he won’t seek reelection for President. We don’t yet know who will replace him, but we know Biden’s tenure in office will soon end. Now is the perfect time to talk about Biden’s legacy as America’s 46th President.

How Presidents are judged by history is a complicated question, and I don’t have much confidence in my ability to predict how the country will remember Joe Biden. But I do have lots of thoughts on how he should be remembered. Basically, I see his policy legacy as a mostly positive one, but I think his political legacy could leave his party in a weaker position going forward.

So I’m going to go through nine major challenges that Biden faced as President, and give my assessment of how he handled each one. I’ll start with economic issues and then move on to foreign policy, social policy, and politics.

1. Covid and the economic recovery

2. Manufacturing and industrial policy

3. Inflation and deficits

4. Afghanistan

5. Ukraine

6. China

7. Immigration and the border

8. Crime and social policy

9. Party politics and elections

That’s a long list, so let’s get right into it.

Covid and the economic recovery

It’s difficult to remember now, but when Biden took over as President, Covid was still rampaging through the country. Of the approximately 1.2 million Americans who died from the pandemic, more than half died after Biden took over:

The economy was starting to recover, but was still in a fairly deep hole, with the prime-age employment rate at only 76.4% when Biden took over (as opposed to 80.8% now).

It’s hard to remember this now, with the economy humming along and Covid reduced to a chronic annoyance. But when Biden came to power, these were the two big challenges facing the country.

Biden handled the challenge of the pandemic extremely well. Vaccines were developed under Trump, but they were distributed under Biden. In the early days, the U.S.’ vaccination effort was world-beating — we were able to manufacture huge amounts of the world’s best vaccines without a hitch, and roll them out extremely rapidly to anyone who wanted one.

It was only once we reached the limit of the number of people who were willing to take the vaccine that we fell short of other countries’ vaccination rates. And I don’t think there’s any way you can blame Biden for the antivax movement.

Biden was also personally instrumental in moving the country past the pandemic psychologically. There’s no official hard-and-fast definition for when a pandemic ends — some people still get H1N1 flu, AIDS, and other viruses that rampaged many years ago. Although we mostly ignore them now, there are some Covid dead-enders within the progressive movement who would have had us continue social distancing, masking, and other pandemic-era policies indefinitely. It was Biden who stood up and said the words “The pandemic is over”, and took off his mask. It took a Democrat to say those words in a way that most progressives would believe. In a very real sense, that was the moment the pandemic ended.

As for the economic recovery, it’s notable that even without the impact of its higher immigration rates, the U.S. left other advanced countries in the dust since the pandemic:

Source: Ernie Tedeschi

The recovery from the Great Recession took the U.S. nine years. We recovered from the Covid shock in just two.

And unlike the recoveries from the last few recessions, this recovery saw America’s lower-wage workers gain much more than the people at the top of the distribution. And wealth rose across the board, especially for less-educated people, young people, rural people, and minorities:

Source: FRB

This is a singular accomplishment. We often take it for granted — just as Americans tend to take every positive development for granted — that the economy would just bounce back during Covid. But if we paid attention to the world beyond our borders, we’d see that most other countries (including China) didn’t bounce back — they’ve taken a long-term hit from the pandemic years, and America hasn’t. .

We don’t know exactly why the U.S. did so uniquely well — with macroeconomics, we never do. Some of the credit has to go to Trump and Congress during the pandemic — the CARES Act provided a uniquely generous cushion of cash that prevented people from being financially ruined in 2020, and in 2021 they came out and spent this cash and boosted the economy back to full employment.

But Biden certainly gets some of the credit too, because his American Rescue Plan was almost as large as the CARES Act. Biden put even more cash into Americans’ pockets, which they also went out and spent. That certainly helped speed the recovery from the pandemic recession even more.

Unfortunately, this also came at a price: government budget deficits and the highest inflation in four decades.

Inflation and deficits

Basic macroeconomic theory says that when the government does a lot of deficit spending and the Fed keeps interest rates low, inflation will rise. That appears to be exactly what happened in the U.S. pandemic recovery. The CARES Act didn’t immediately raise inflation, but it put a lot of cash in Americans’ bank accounts, and when they came out and spent it, that probably pushed prices up. The same is true of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, except that people probably spent the cash right away instead of waiting.

Just how much Biden’s policies were responsible for inflation is an open question that economists debate a lot. A temporary oil and food price shock in 2022, from the start of the Ukraine war, also contributed, as did the snarling of supply chains in the pandemic. Whether the ARP’s effect on inflation was an acceptable price to pay for the ARP’s additional boost to the U.S.’ economic recovery will always be an open question. But I think it’s safe to say that this is an ambiguous aspect of Biden’s legacy, especially since inflation is one of the reasons voters might toss the Democrats out of power now.

What’s less ambiguous, however, is that Biden did a lot to fight inflation. One thing he did was open up lots of U.S. land for oil drilling. This broke a campaign promise of his, and pissed off a lot of progressive and leftist groups. It was thus an impressive act of political courage. But it worked. U.S. oil production under Biden soared to record levels:

Source: EIA

Not only is the U.S. producing more oil under Biden than it ever has before, but it’s producing more oil than any other country has, in history. That’s on top of producing record amounts of energy from renewables.

Biden’s oil glut helped bring the prices of crude oil and gasoline back down sharply, blunting inflation. But that wasn’t the only thing he did. Biden also reappointed Jerome Powell to the Fed, instead of replacing him with a political progressive who would have been more dovish on inflation. This again took political courage, because there was a substantial wing of the Democratic party who thought inflation was transitory, and wasn’t that big of a deal anyway, and that rate hikes would threaten the employment recovery.

Biden defied the progressives, and his bet paid off. Powell hiked rates to over 5%, and inflation fell most of the way back toward its 2% target, with little visible cost to the economy. A bout of bank weakness in early 2023 was swiftly dealt with before it could pose a danger.

Some of the fall in inflation wasn’t Biden’s doing — supply chains unsnarled themselves, Russia started shipping a ton of oil to China and India, and American consumers ran out of the extra cash they had saved from the pandemic relief bills. But boosting oil drilling and reappointing Powell were two big, politically risky moves that ended up paying off, and Biden deserves credit.

Unfortunately, high interest rates had something else — they massively increased the interest cost that the U.S. federal government has to pay on its debt.

Interest costs are a big reason the U.S. deficit didn’t fall more from the end of pandemic relief spending. It’s why years after the pandemic, with a great economy, Biden is still running budget deficits comparable to what the U.S. ran during the Great Recession:

Biden could have done yet another risky political move and called for fiscal austerity. Instead, he did two things to raise long-term deficits. First, he extended the health care subsidies that he passed early in his term, making it clear that he wanted these to be permanent. And he used the federal government’s ownership of student debt to forgive massive amounts of student loans — not just a one-off forgiveness, but an indefinite promise to let students off the hook for much of the debt they incur in the future. This huge subsidy to the higher education industry will cause a big increase in the U.S. structural budget deficit going forward.

Subsidizing overpriced, supply-constrained service industries like health care and higher education is a really bad way to run an economy — it mostly just pushes prices up while leaving people with about the same amount of health care and education as before. At the same time, these enormous but mostly useless subsidies increase the federal budget deficit, which in turn tends to raise inflation. That puts pressure on every other kind of government spending — welfare, defense, infrastructure, and so on.

Although the wisdom of Biden’s temporary Covid relief spending in 2021 is arguable, I don’t see much justification for the long-term increases in health care and higher ed subsidies. This, as I see it, was Biden’s biggest economic mistake.

Manufacturing, industrial policy, and trade

Now we get to the part of Biden’s economic legacy that I see as the most significant. Donald Trump rhetorically smashed the old “neoliberal” economic consensus of free trade and lack of government interference in industry. But Trump didn’t do much to replace that old model with something new — his tariffs were pretty mild, and he didn’t manage to do any reshoring of industry whatsoever.

Biden came in and actually did the reindustrialization that Trump had only talked about doing. I’ve written a lot about this already, so I’ll just quote myself from a previous post:

With a pair of landmark bills — the (somewhat misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act — he enacted America’s first real systematic manufacturing-oriented industrial policy since at least the early 1990s, and possibly since World War 2. A massive factory construction boom began almost immediately after the bills were signed:

Note that this graph is adjusted for the cost of new industrial building construction. So this isn’t a graph of inflation we’re looking at — this is a huge increase in actual construction. You can also see a big bump in construction employment in the nonresidential sector — despite the commercial real estate bust!

What kind of factories are being built? The new spending is mostly on chips and batteries:

Source: Joey Politano

So this is clearly a result of Biden’s two big bills. The U.S., which so often finds itself unable to build anything, is actually building something.

It’s still early days, of course. In fact, manufacturing output and employment haven’t risen yet! Building factories takes time. There are still many hurdles yet to overcome, and it’s a learning process. But finally, a President actually did something to restore U.S. manufacturing. After all those years of talk, someone did something, and that someone was Joe Biden.

The bigger question, of course, is: Was this the right thing to do? Plenty of people say that we shouldn’t be focusing on manufacturing at all — that we should simply step back and let the free market do its work, and that industrial policy is wasteful. We won’t know for a while whether they’re right. But what we do know is that China is ramping up its manufacturing machine to an incredible degree; in the face of that competition, we can either simply stop making anything in tradable manufactured goods and let our main rival do it all, while we specialize in agriculture and finance, or we can try to fight back.

“Fight back” is obviously the correct option. The usefulness of an economy is not measured purely in dollars of profit; an industrial economy is absolutely necessary in order to sustain a modern military that can keep us safe in the face of unprecedented external threats. Finance and agriculture cannot, by themselves, defend us against Chinese drones, missiles, and warships. Only manufacturing can do that. Semiconductors and batteries are incredibly crucial to defense manufacturing — chips are essential for every military device, especially precision weapons, and batteries power many of the drones that are taking over the battlefield. And of course, batteries are essential for fighting climate change, too.

In other words, Biden picked exactly the right industries to support. And our success or failure in supporting those industries will yield priceless insights for future efforts in other industries, like drones, ships, etc.

Meanwhile, the impact of this factory spending is widely distributed throughout the country — new battery factories are mostly in the South and Midwest, while a bunch of new chip factories are in Arizona, Texas, upstate New York, and the Mountain West. This means that industrial policy won’t just pour ever more investment into a few coastal “superstar” cities, as was the norm for the previous three decades.

This is the most consequential change in U.S. economic policy since Ronald Reagan. Trump may have been the one to smash the old free-trade laissez-faire consensus, but Biden is the first to start building something new in its place.

This, I think, was Biden’s biggest economic achievement — bigger than Covid relief, inflation-fighting, service industry subsidies, or anything else he did. And bigger, in many ways, than anything Trump or Obama or George Bush did. Biden gave the U.S. a new economic model, and the ramifications of that shift are just beginning to be felt. We don’t yet know if Biden’s new model is a good one, but something had to be done, and Biden, unlike his predecessors, did something.

Afghanistan

Now we turn to foreign policy. Lots of Americans see the Afghanistan pullout as Biden’s biggest foreign policy failure — a “humiliating” defeat, a “betrayal”, and so on. It was after the Afghanistan withdrawal that Biden’s poll numbers took a turn for the worse and never recovered.

What few people seem to realize, however, is that the U.S. mostly withdrew from Afghanistan six or seven years before the official pullout:

Source: BBC

The Afghanistan invasion was primarily a punitive expedition — a raid to capture or kill the people who did 9/11. After that task was complete, Obama pulled most of our troops out of the country and kept a skeleton force there.

From that day forward, it was a certainty that the Taliban — the only group in Afghanistan with broad popular support — would come back to power. The only questions were when and how. In 2020, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban promising that the U.S. would withdraw completely from Afghanistan in 2021. Biden simply held up the U.S.’ end of the deal Trump signed.

You can argue that Biden should have canceled Trump’s deal and tried to postpone the date of the U.S. withdrawal indefinitely. Try as I might, I simply do not see what the point of this would have been. Afghanistan is a violent, impoverished, landlocked country filled with rival tribes and gangs. There was no way that keeping 10,000 American troops in that country permanently was going to transform Afghanistan into a Japan-style liberal democracy.

The Afghanistan war had thus become a pointless babysitting operation. Obama should have ripped the band-aid off and withdrawn fully in 2015. Trump should have ripped the band-aid off and withdrawn fully in 2019. Both were too scared of the political consequences of being seen to “lose” a war, so they left it to Biden to rip the band-aid off, and he did. It was an act of political courage, for which Biden was unfairly punished in the court of public opinion.

Now, you can argue that Biden should have handled the Afghanistan withdrawal better than he did. The Taliban killed zero American soldiers during the pullout — probably because they were holding up their end of the bargain they had struck with Trump in 2020. But a small rogue terrorist group called ISIS-K took advantage of the chaos to stage a bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members. The Taliban later killed the people behind that bombing, but in the minds of many Americans, the attack turned an orderly pullout into a rout.

That perception is ridiculous and unfair, but it is what it is. Conservative pundits and leftists alike wasted no time in screeching that it was a “humiliation”, yet another “lost war”, and blah blah. It’s dumb, but that’s how American public opinion works — if it’s not WW2, it’s a “loss”.

The one thing I’d knock Biden over, concerning the Afghanistan pullout, was his failure to give speedy asylum to more of the translators and other Afghan workers who had assisted the U.S. during the occupation. This was Biden’s concession to right-wing anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S., and I think it was shameful.

Ukraine

It’s hard to find a clearer-cut case of international morality than the Ukraine war. A powerful country launched an unprovoked invasion of a poorer and weaker country that hadn’t attacked it and didn’t threaten it at all, with the aim of conquering and subjugating that country. The people of the smaller country fought back fiercely to defend their homes and families. It’s the stuff of Netflix movies.

Somehow, a small faction of rightists — aided by some leftists like Noam Chomsky — has twisted this morality tale around in their minds, embracing the Russian propaganda line that Putin’s invasion was provoked by the West. When the venture capitalist David Sacks — a perennial champion of the Russian propaganda line — gave a speech at the Republican National Convention accusing Biden of provoking Russia to war, no one clapped. The reason is that most people know that Sacks’ Most Republicans — even most of those who self-identify as “MAGA” — still think it’s important for Ukraine to win their war against Russia:

Source: AEI

So it’s worthwhile to step back and realize that if Biden hadn’t been in the White House when Russia invaded, there’s a very good chance that Ukraine wouldn’t exist as a country right now — that it would be a Russian colony, furnishing slave soldiers and slave workers for Russia to make further inroads into Eastern Europe. Biden rushed modern antitank missiles, precision artillery, and other modern weapons to the Ukrainians in large numbers, very quickly; this allowed the Ukrainians to thwart the attempted conquest of their capital and hold Russia to a thin strip of land in the country’s east. European countries certainly helped, but Joe Biden’s aid was decisive.

And saving Ukraine from enslavement and devastation came at surprisingly little cost to the U.S. Of the $175 billion that the U.S. has set aside for Ukraine — a small fraction of the cost of Biden’s student debt cancellation — only $37 billion has been actual cash. The bulk of U.S. aid has been in the form of weapons — weapons that the U.S. government pays its own defense contractors to make.

That in turn has stimulated a slow revival of the U.S. defense-industrial base, which withered to almost nothing after the end of the Cold War. If the U.S. ever ends up having to fight China, it will need to be able to produce missiles, drones, ships, ammunition, and so on. It’s still woefully underprepared, but slightly less underprepared than if the U.S. had sat back and let Russia conquer Ukraine.

In addition, Biden and his administration managed to lead the fractious countries of Europe — including the UK — to a regional unity that they haven’t known in a very long time, if ever. Europe’s unity may not last if and when the U.S. turns its attention to the Pacific, but it has been a truly remarkable feat of diplomacy.

All the criticisms of Biden’s Ukraine policy — that he was too slow to give Ukraine the most advanced weapons or to allow Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil, or that he transferred too much equipment from the Pacific to Ukraine — are second-order things compared to Biden’s basic action of standing up in defense of freedom.

China

Trump dished out a lot of harsh rhetoric against China — blaming them for Covid, for taking American jobs, and so on. And his administration did take a much harsher approach toward China than any other — leveling export controls against some Chinese companies, slapping tariffs on Chinese goods, and trying to root out Chinese spies in U.S. academia.

Instead of reversing Trump’s tough line, Biden doubled down. His export controls on the Chinese chip industry went far beyond anything Trump had ever done (and unlike Trump, he didn’t cancel them arbitrarily). And Biden’s export controls are working so far, pushing down China’s semiconductor yields and preventing them from advancing to the most advanced levels of technology. Biden also slapped tariffs on Chinese products that went well beyond anything Trump had done. Biden also signed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok to sell to a non-Chinese company, thus striking the most significant blow against Chinese information operations undertaken by any President ever.

Biden also conducted a flurry of diplomacy to check China’s advances in Asia. He invited Narendra Modi to Washington and signed a bunch of agreements with India. He strengthened the Quad (which includes the U.S., Japan, India, Australia, and some observer countries) and created AUKUS (which includes the UK and Australia). Perhaps most importantly, Biden rekindled America’s alliance with the Philippines, helping it stand up against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. Now the Philippines is letting the U.S. build bases on its northern island that could be used to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

It’s possible to criticize this record from both the hawkish and the dovish sides. If you’re a hawk, you might bash Biden for diverting Patriot missile systems, aircraft carriers, and other arms to Europe — or to the Middle East and Israel. You might also criticize him for trying to turn the temperature down with a summit with Xi Jinping in San Francisco in 2023. If you’re a dove, you might think that Biden’s approach is needlessly confrontational, and that his tariffs and other economic strategies will end up hurting the U.S. more than China.

But again, those criticisms feel marginal to me. Biden’s approach to China has been significantly tougher, smarter, more effective, and more multilateral than Trump’s — and leaps and bounds better than previous American Presidents. Biden was responsible for the concrete implementation of a shift in China policy that Trump motivated but couldn’t or wouldn’t follow through on. In my book, that’s an important legacy.

Immigration and the border

One of the things that Americans are most angry about under Biden is the situation at the southwestern border. Basically, U.S. asylum law contains a huge loophole — if you cross the border illegally and turn yourself in to the Border Patrol, you’re entitled to an asylum hearing in the U.S. just as if you had presented yourself lawfully at a port of entry. This loophole has lured millions of people from all over the world — but especially from Central America — to flood across America’s long, porous southern border:

Source: Border Patrol

During his first term in office, Trump cracked down on asylum seeking, but his new rules were mostly struck down by U.S. courts — after all, the asylum loophole is enshrined in U.S. law.

Biden has been absolutely great on legal immigration, increasing the number of green cards and expanding visas for STEM workers. But for the first two and a half years of his presidency, Biden basically did nothing about the border flood or the asylum loophole. Perhaps he and his advisors believed that the flood of asylum-seekers wouldn’t come back after it paused during Covid. Or perhaps they were swayed by the arguments of progressive intellectuals and pressure groups who view the right to asylum-seeking — even if it involves illegal border-crossing — as a fundamental human right. Or perhaps they wanted to publicly draw a moral distinction between themselves and the Trump administration, which had been pilloried in the press for keeping “kids in cages”. Or perhaps they simply felt they had other things to worry about.

But regardless of the reason, Biden ignored the border long into his presidency, and the problem exploded. Red-state governors made political hay by busing migrants to blue cities like New York, which suddenly discovered that taking care of huge numbers of penniless migrants costs a lot of money. People got very mad. In fact, they got so mad that on opinion polls, it appears that the whole country has turned against immigration to a degree not seen since the nativist freakout of the early 1990s:

Source: Gallup

This turn in public opinion is an unmitigated disaster for those of us who believe that openness to immigration is a core part of the American story. It also spells bad news for the U.S. economy and U.S. national security, both of which depend heavily on continued immigration.

Yes, some asylum seekers will now be able to stay in the U.S. — mostly illegally — due to Biden’s neglect of the issue. This is not a victory. The goal of U.S. immigration policy should not be to sneak as many people in under the wire as possible before the restrictionists inevitably crack down. The goal of U.S. immigration policy should be to build sensible long-lasting immigration policies that are broadly popular enough to ensure a stable long-term inflow of population.

In the final year of his term, Biden and his administration realized this, and brought back many Trump-style restrictions on asylum. As a result, illegal border crossings abruptly plunged. These restrictions may eventually be invalidated in court, much as Trump’s were; what’s really needed to stop the border flood and restore order is a legislative change in America’s basic asylum law, to make it difficult or impossible to get an asylum hearing if you’re in the country illegally. But no one — Democrat or Republican — seems interested in making this change. And so the long border crisis lurches on, unresolved.

If Biden didn’t feel he had the political capital to fix the asylum system — or to explain to an angry nation why the current system is a moral imperative — than at least he should have taken the executive actions of summer 2024 back in summer 2021, when it became apparent that 2020’s pause in border crossings had been temporary. As it was, Biden waited way too long to do the second-best policy, and his legacy will be a bit tarnished by this oversight.

Crime and social policy

Crime spiked under Trump in 2020, and then rose very slightly again in 2021. But for the past two and a half years, violent crime has been plummeting. Some people try to dispute this fact, but in fact we have a LOT of different data sources and methodologies to measure violent crime, and they all agree. I wrote a post going through the data here:

Yes, of course crime is way down

The question of how much credit Biden deserves for the drop is a lot thornier. I don’t think I’ll be able to give a better rundown than in my earlier post, so I’ll just quote myself again:

As for how much Biden has contributed to the crime decline since 2021, that’s less of a moral question and more of a factual one, but it’s still subject to huge uncertainties. Maybe Biden’s calming, grandfatherly presence in the White House helped cool the passions unleashed by the Trump era — but if so, we’ll never really know.

Biden is unquestionably a tough-on-crime President. From the very first moment that “Defund the police” became a rallying cry of the BLM protesters, Biden came out strongly against the idea. Early in his presidency, he released a plan to put 100,000 more cops on the streets of America.

It’s not clear, though, how much Biden’s tough-on-crime attitudes have translated into policy at the local level. We do know that increased policing does reduce crime by a significant amount. Biden’s Safer America Plan never made it past Congress. He did manage to increase spending on the COPS program and a few other federal initiatives to support local cops, but federal spending on policing did fall as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2021 and 2022. And other than funding law enforcement, the federal government does relatively little to affect crime trends at the local level, where policing policies and budgets are mostly determined.

Biden did, however, do one thing that might have made a substantive difference: He gave money to local governments. Justin Fox argues that this allowed local governments to sustain or even increase their spending on policing, at exactly the time when pro-police sentiment was rising…

So perhaps Biden did help bring crime down — he certainly wanted to, despite opposition from some in his own party. But how much he contributed is hard to know.

But one way or another, I’d rate Biden’s legacy on crime as a positive one. If crime falls drastically on your watch, you did something right, if only by not doing anything wrong.

On social policy, it’s hard to judge, since social policies are largely a matter of opinion. For example, I think Biden’s signing of a bipartisan bill to codify interracial marriage and gay marriage as the law of the land was a great move. I also support his moves to protect abortion rights, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s cancellation of Roe v. Wade. If you’re one of the people who thinks abortion and gay marriage are bad, you’ll inevitably disagree, and there’s not much I can do for you.

That doesn’t mean I support every social policy Biden has done. Biden’s idea to earmark certain Covid relief funds specifically for certain races of Americans — which was struck down in court — had noble intentions but was not a good way to go about helping Black and Hispanic Americans build wealth. Americans are OK with some tacit racial discrimination, but they don’t like the explicit, legal kind. And I’m no exception.

But that’s just a small example; overall, I just don’t think Biden has been very much of a culture warrior. The exception might be Biden’s move on changing Title IX to accommodate trans athletes, which is causing a big ruckus in the states. But in general I just think culture war issues have taken a back seat under Biden — despite some pretty important SCOTUS rulings striking down abortion rights and affirmative action. I don’t think the culture wars will be an important part of Biden’s legacy.

Party politics and elections

So far, I’ve mostly stuck to evaluating Biden’s policies, not his political acumen. The reason is that I know much more about the former than about the latter. But I do have some thoughts about Biden’s communication style during his presidency, and what this might have done to the Democratic Party’s electoral chances.

First, I think it’s pretty obvious that Biden should have dropped out earlier. The strategic choice to stay in the race right up until the eve of the convention now leaves Dems scrambling not just to decide on a replacement, but to promote that replacement as an alternative to Trump.

Like Matt Yglesias, I honestly didn’t realize how badly Biden had gone mentally downhill during his presidency, until I saw him in his debate against Trump. It was like seeing a completely different man than in 2020. But Biden’s associates, appointees, and various handlers had to have known; they see him every day. If Biden and his people really believed that democracy was on the line in November, they would have known that his advanced age would be a huge liability. But not only did they do nothing, they resisted swapping Biden out for weeks after the debate, allowing Trump to dominate the narrative entirely.

In fact, I suspect that Biden’s advancing years had a lot to do with the administration’s failure to communicate the policy successes I listed in this post. How many Americans even know that Biden’s Afghanistan pullout was honoring a withdrawal agreement that Trump signed with the Taliban? How many Americans know what export controls are, or why they matter? How many know what was even in the American Rescue Plan? How many people signing up to work at factories built with Chips Act subsidies know that Biden signed that bill? And so on.

I suspect that the need to conceal Biden’s age prevented him from getting out there in front of the American people and informing them about all the things his administration did for the country. I’m not sure what could have been done about that — if Biden’s age-related decline had become apparent in 2023, for example, there would have been massive pressure on him to resign. And he was probably the only Dem who could have beaten Trump in 2020.

But I don’t think age was the only factor here. I’ve also noticed that the Biden administration seems to think that releasing good policy proposals is, by itself, an important political act.

For example, in the days after Biden’s disastrous debate, his team seemed to throw several Hail Mary passes — radical populist proposals designed to get back in the good graces of the average American. These included a proposal for nationwide federally mandated rent control, and term limits for the Supreme Court.

Set aside, for a moment, how desperate these ideas seem. And set aside that the rent control idea is bad on the merits, and the SCOTUS term limits are likely to be far more controversial than polls suggest. The key question to ask is: Who was even paying attention? These are truly radical ideas, but they just got swallowed up by the news cycle with barely a peep — much like many of Biden’s actual policies did during his term.

This is the most harebrained sort of politics — populism without popularity. It reminds me of nothing so much as Elizabeth Warren’s doomed, fizzled 2020 presidential bid. Again and again, Warren came out with Bernie-like populist proposals, but utterly failed to appeal to the young people and working-class people that formed Bernie’s base. It wasn’t just sexism — maybe not even sexism at all. Warren is just a consummate wonk, at home in a room full of highly educated staffers or at an expensive foundation dinner, but awkward on the campaign trail and on the debate stage.

In fact, the resemblance is no coincidence. Elizabeth Warren’s staffers and mentees are very numerous in the Biden administration, and many of the administration’s ideas come straight from Warren. Some of these policy ideas are great, and some are terrible, but Biden and his people almost never figured out how to sell any of them to the American public any more than Warren did. This has been an administration of bipartisan backroom deals and technocratic debates. That was all fine and good…until Trump came back on the scene.

What I worry now is that despite being a truly transformative President — arguably the best of my lifetime, despite his age and his mess-ups on the border and the deficit — Biden will be remembered as a doddering, bumbling caretaker. This is what happened to Jimmy Carter:

Repost: Much of what you've heard about Carter and Reagan is wrong

Reagan got credit for beating inflation, but it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed. Reagan got credit for bringing down the USSR, but it was Carter who funded the Afghan mujahideen. And it was Carter who implemented the energy conservation and deregulation measures that ultimately helped break OPEC, bring down oil prices, and cause the USSR’s economic collapse. Reagan got credit for being a deregulator, but it was Carter who deregulated trucking and energy. And so on. Almost no one remembers any of this.

Similarly, Trump might end up taking credit for many of the landmark policies Biden initiated. If inflation stays low, Trump will go down as the low-inflation President, just like Reagan — even though it was Biden who took the hard steps needed to stabilize prices. The burst of manufacturing jobs from the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act will probably only materialize over the next few years, because factories take years to build — the result might be that Trump gets remembered as the guy who reshored manufacturing. And if Putin does sign a cease-fire with Ukraine, it will be seen as a testament to Trump’s leadership — despite the fact that without Biden, there would be no Ukraine to even sign a cease-fire.

So yes, I’m frustrated. History doesn’t always reflect the truth — sometimes the bumblers were actually heroes and the heroes were actually bumblers. I hope Biden’s policy legacy isn’t destroyed by his failure to stir the nation’s passions.

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