By Jim Geraghty
Friday, January 03, 2025
On the menu today: Back on December 13, I noticed that the Biden
administration released its “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and
Anti-Arab Hate” and announced the establishment of two China-focused
initiatives and observed there was something a little absurd about the Biden
team unveiling “short, medium, and long-term actions” with 38 days left in
Biden’s presidency. These guys are the short term.
Now, we are 17 days away from the start of Donald Trump’s
second term, and Biden — or more accurately, the team around our mumbling,
stumbling octogenarian president — is trying to push through a difficult-to-rescind ban on new oil and gas drilling in large
sections of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, enacted last-minute changes to the H-1B and H-2 visa programs to
increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S., locked in hybrid work protections for tens of thousands of
staffers at the Social Security Administration, set a new Paris Climate Agreement goal to reduce U.S. net
emissions by 61-66 percent in 2035 (that one will be easier to rescind), and attempted to hinder efforts to increase U.S. exports of liquid
natural gas. And of course, there’s been the pardon-palooza.
It makes Bill Clinton’s staffers stealing all the “W”s from the White
House keyboards look quaint.
Festivus was December 23, but this bitter president has
been airing his grievances for weeks.
A Disgraceful Ending to a Weak Presidency
Joe Biden is ending his presidency on one bitter note
after another: a blanket pardon of his son that he repeatedly promised he would never give. A sweeping commutation for a group of allegedly “non-violent”
offenders that included a Maryland woman nicknamed “the Black Widow,” for murdering two husbands and a
boyfriend for insurance money. A ludicrously inconsistent commutation of the death sentences
for every killer in federal custody, except for the three most famous ones. The
same old hiding from reporters, with no sign of a term-closing press
conference.
And now, the Washington Post reports, “Biden and some of his
aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate
performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to
drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could
have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments.”
(As usual, the White House declined to make Biden
available for an interview.)
This morning, the editors of National Review declare, “The nation
(and our mainstream media) having long since accustomed itself to the reality
that the president of the United States is mentally unfit for the job and that
we are currently being governed by a cadre of his advisers instead.”
Perhaps the clearest sign that our octogenarian president
is no longer of sound mind is that he thinks that after trailing throughout the year, he could have bounced back
from that disastrous debate performance — the one that he attributed to a cold
and jet lag from a trip overseas twelve days earlier — and beaten Trump, when Kamala
Harris, Tim Walz, and $2 billion in spending couldn’t even win one of the seven
swing states.
How easily some people forget that Biden stumbled around
for more than three weeks after the debate, complaining to NBC’s Lester Holt
that the media never covers any of Trump’s lies, referring to U.S. Secret
Service director Kimberly Cheatle as a “he,” declaring he couldn’t remember
whether he had spoken to Barack Obama since the debate, and forgetting the name
of Defense secretary Lloyd Austin and referring to him as “the black man” in an interview with BET.
Biden started his presidency at the outer limits of age
for a president and finishes it well outside. (Comparably energetic as Donald
Trump is, it is not reassuring that the incoming president will turn 79 on June
14.)
If Biden wanted to drive a stake into Trumpism, he needed
to address the insufficiently secure southern border and high rates of illegal
immigration. Instead, when the pace of migration over the border increased in
the first months of his presidency, Biden dismissed it: “It happens every
single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people
coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It
happens every year.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters at the
border jumped in spring of 2021 and largely stayed high during Biden’s term. The problem
festered because, according
to Axios, “Any administration leaders treated the issue like a hot
potato because it was politically thankless. . . . The idea that no one wanted
to ‘own it’ came up repeatedly in interviews about the border crisis.” But when
you are president, you “own” these issues, whether you like it or not. Through
his neglect, Biden planted the seeds of the Trump comeback.
The Post also reported, “In private,
Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as
attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under
Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son
Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments.” Right, right, that was
the problem, not Hunter Biden’s spectacularly self-destructive decision-making.
If Biden really believes, as he claims, the U.S. Department of Justice “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” his son, he ought to
blame the guy who assured the country that Garland was, “a man of
impeccable integrity, one the most respected jurists of our time. Brilliant,
yet humble. Distinguished, yet modest. Full of character and decency.” The
president can find that guy in the mirror.
Even the “history will remember him well” spin from
Biden’s top aides doesn’t pass the smell test. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national
security adviser with strong prospects in the restaurant industry, told the Post,
“The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while
the political cycle is measured in four years.” Democrats can fairly ask why
Biden, Sullivan, and the rest of the team didn’t pay more attention to that
four-year time horizon; the American public is sufficiently patient and more
than reasonable to expect some results by the end of the first term. Also . . .
how is history going to remember Biden well if Trump is going to spend the
coming years undoing so much of what Biden spent the past four years doing?
Biden’s term includes some accomplishments, including the
rollout of the Covid vaccines and an initially strong response to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine. (Initially strong; over time Biden grew more hesitant, terrified of any move being perceived as
“escalatory” or “provocative.”)
But the Biden we see today is the one history will
remember — a shuffling and muttering geriatric, usually away from the cameras,
but when he is in front of them, he’s full of self-pity and blames everyone but
himself for the disappointments of his lone term.
After Biden withdrew from the race, former House speaker
Nancy Pelosi — who reportedly had a large role in prying the nomination from
Biden’s fingers — said Biden had been “a Mount Rushmore kind of president of
the United States. . . . You have Teddy Roosevelt up there. And he’s wonderful.
I don’t say take him down. But you can add Biden.”
While I concur that granite is indeed a dense enough
material to represent Biden’s noggin, few will ever rank Biden — the
intermission between two Trump terms — among America’s greatest presidents.
What we see today is who he always was: a bitter old man who overstayed his
welcome.
ADDENDUM: Politico examined the Biden administration’s big
spending initiatives and found, “A $42 billion expansion of broadband
internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling,
equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to
install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just
47 stations in 15 states.”
Ezra
Klein responds, “It’s hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of
broadband when it hasn’t expanded broadband. Change is what gets built, not how
much money gets appropriated to build.”
Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias observes, “Journalists and (especially)
academics are much more left-wing than the overall public, so the injections of
nuance tend to be asymmetrical and, as a result, can sometimes leave you less
informed than if you’d stuck with a simpler take.”
It took a long, long while, but those Vox guys are
starting to grow on me! Although to be honest, I’ve never felt, as Klein
described, “the feeling of anxiety around opening a new article and knowing
that I was about to feel stupid. I was about to feel like I was outside the
club. This is a real problem.”
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