The Tragicomic Arc of Joe Biden’s Presidency

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

 

There’s a poetry to Biden’s rise and fall — an epic story of how hubris and vanity led him to take a hatchet to everything he has built.

 

The story of Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House is a two-part tale. The first part, which has been written and written again, is the story of how Biden (for the most part) declined to participate in the game of rhetorical one-upmanship to which the party’s progressives committed themselves. The far Left spent much of 2019 promising radical reforms to the American compact and peppering Biden with every fashionable accusation of bigotry it could conjure — from racism to homophobia to “fat-shaming.” Biden did not exactly refuse to play this game, but he played it sparingly and with so little enthusiasm that he was able to secure the mantle of the moderate in the race.

 

The second part of Biden’s ascent — the story of how Democratic establishmentarians worked together to seal his nomination — is all but forgotten. When Biden, with the help of the powerful Congressional Black Caucus, came roaring back in South Carolina after defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, Democratic powerbrokers collectively shut down the race. From almost the moment the polls closed in the Palmetto State, Democrats ranging from elder statesmen like Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Senators Tammy Duckworth and Tim Kaine to then–Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe signaled in unison their support for Biden. Candidates who saw a future for themselves in Democratic politics — like the victor of the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar — suspended their campaigns. With that, the balance of power shifted decisively in Biden’s direction. It was a display of collective action in defiance of the activist Left, and we have not seen its like from Democrats since.

 

Today, Joe Biden is suffering the wrath of the establishmentarians to whom he was once a champion. Party members who can read the polls would prefer it if Biden shuffled off the public stage, but their revolt against their party’s leadership has rendered their effort leaderless and, so far, ineffective. By contrast, the party’s progressive insurgents — the so-called Squad, Senator Bernie Sanders, and others — have lined up behind Biden, and he has returned the favor by dropping the moderate act.

 

In the last several days, Biden has made a conspicuous performance of his conversion to left-wing radicalism. He’s leashed himself to an impossibly foolish plan for something like a national rent-control program. He is floating a proposal that would impose term limits and an “enforceable” code of ethics on the Supreme Court in response to the fevered monomania in progressive quarters over the imagined perfidy of the Court’s conservative justices. He fled from his own promise to adopt a more civil, prudent tone on the campaign trail in the wake of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life — eschewing thoughtful introspection in favor of the partisan bombast he decried in the hours after the attack.

 

There is no guile to this strategy. It is obvious to all that the president’s embrace of “a laundry list of left-wing policy proposals” is an effort to exploit the progressive Left and turn it against his own party in the hope that the implicit threat of internecine warfare stays the hands of Democrats who would jettison him from the Democratic ticket. “It’s saved his candidacy,” Axios remarked, “for now.”

 

There is something darkly comic in the trajectory of Biden’s presidency. He reached the top of the greasiest pole in American politics by skillfully avoiding the traps into which the party’s progressives fell in 2019. But today, he seems to believe he has no other choice but to wield his erstwhile opponents on the left like the weapons he knows them to be. He’s turned the insurgent factions within his party into a torpedo and aimed it squarely at the Democratic Party’s hull. The message is clear: If I’m going down, you’re coming with me. And all to secure his own future amid the revolt of the very moderates and establishmentarians to whom he owes his presidency.

 

Every indication is that Biden himself is so cosseted in an ever-tightening inner circle that he may be genuinely unaware of the political peril he faces, but the circle itself is fully aware of the president’s deteriorating position. The effort to turn progressives into hostage takers is likely only to succeed in securing Biden’s renomination, not his ultimate victory in the fall. That suits the purposes of Biden’s handlers, who want nothing more than to ensure that the president’s legacy will be defined by something other than one horrible debate with Donald Trump. Those on the far left who have sidled up alongside their former adversary stand only to gain, too. If Biden somehow wins the White House again, he will owe his victory to them. If he loses, progressives will insist it was only because the president lacked the requisite radicalism. Either way, their profiles will get a needed boost. The only true losers in this game are the Democratic establishmentarians who put all their stock in Biden in the first place.

 

There’s a poetry to Joe Biden’s rise and fall — an epic story of how hubris and vanity led him to take a hatchet to everything he has built. It would be wholly tragic were it not for the degree to which Democrats spent the early years of Biden’s ascendancy congratulating themselves on their capacity for collective action in contrast with their Republican counterparts. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to see the comedy in the spectacle of Biden’s self-destruction. It is a classic political reversal — a full-circle moment for Democrats who succumbed to their own pride. “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard.”