Biden’s Greatest Strengths Proved His Undoing

For the past few weeks, Joe Biden has cut a deeply unattractive figure. Unable to escape a lifetime of resentments and mired in self-pity, he has stubbornly bucked his party’s elite. It has been exceedingly difficult to view Biden as anything other than an old man, wildly out of sync with his times.

But the same qualities that have served him so terribly as a candidate were also responsible for his policy successes. Right now, most Democrats can see Biden only as a millstone, but history will remember him as one of the most effective presidents of his era. His fingerprints will be all over the American future.

When Biden came to office, pundits liked to cast him as a placeholder—a well-meaning grandpa who would help restore the country’s equilibrium in the aftermath of Trump’s madness. In Biden’s mind, that was just the members of the elite dismissing him, as they always did. Their underestimation stoked his determination to prove himself as one of history’s great men. He privately boasted that his performance would make him worthy of the presidential pantheon that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

With a one-vote majority in the Senate, he audaciously set out to test the limits of what he could accomplish. The American Rescue Plan, passed in the first months of his presidency, pushed social policy in novel directions. It transferred money directly into bank accounts through the child tax credit, the closest the federal government has come to experimenting with universal basic income. For a brief, glorious moment, the legislation helped cut childhood poverty in half.

But the American Rescue Plan was just the early harvest of an exceptionally verdant legislative season. At a moment when Democrats described moderate Republicans as useless toadies, Biden wooed them—and cobbled together bipartisan majorities to pass an infrastructure bill and the CHIPS act. Like Biden, these bills were dismissed as unexciting. But Biden was trying to restore the American state to its post-war glories. Harkening back to Cold War investments in science, the CHIPS bill spends significant cash on research and development, and the infrastructure bill renovates the transit systems, byways of economic competitiveness.

His signature accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, a dreadfully unexciting name for a hugely significant bill. With its subsidies for clean energy, it will be remembered as the first massive American effort to contain climate change. And perhaps as significantly, it will be remembered as the moment when the nation re-embraced industrial policy. That is, the state began using its resources to guarantee the international dominance of American firms in electric vehicles and alternative energies, the industries of the future.

That’s the most surprising part of the Biden presidency. He broke with the economic paradigm that dominated policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Where those presidents choked when delivering the praise for unions that party politics demanded, Biden walked the picket line and lent presidential prestige to the movement. He reversed several generations of indifference to the problem of monopoly and installed regulators who went after Big Tech ferociously.

His supreme sense of self-confidence allowed him to buck the conventional wisdom of foreign-policy mandarins. Both Obama and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but only Biden had the courage to actually execute that decision—although his chaotic execution of a move voters overwhelmingly supported eroded confidence in his presidency. A devoted believer in old-fashioned transatlanticism, he plowed money and arms into the defense of Ukraine, as if the future of Europe depended on it. These were bold decisions that a president with lesser experience—and a lesser sense of his own acumen—wouldn’t have had the gumption to make.

Biden hates abstraction and pretension. But in his best moments, he could think like a grand strategist. I once heard him extemporaneously describe everything he had done to counter China, and it was impressive to behold. He deepened America’s entanglement with Australia. He helped mend the long rift between Japan and South Korea, so that they could focus on the shared threat they now faced. He successfully schmoozed Narendra Modi, so that India shifted towards the American sphere of influence. Without receiving much credit, he actually managed the pivot to Asia that Obama first promised.

Over the course of his term, when the press dismissed him as a failure, he kept pushing forward. Biden never shifted blame onto his aides—and never fired them to cover his own mistakes. He pushed ambitiously, even though he often did so at the risk of his own humiliation.

Before his age became the source of his political demise, it supplied him with wisdom. Before his stubbornness inured him to the inevitable, it carried him to unlikely triumphs. His response to criticism was to always double down on himself.

By running for reelection, despite his advanced age, he was falling back on these very tendencies, disastrously so. Desperately in search of the credit he believed that the world unfairly denied him, he couldn’t relinquish power. He kept insisting on his own indispensability. By shunning the elites calling for him to drop out, he was also shunning common sense.

But in the end, he has finally relinquished the job he spent his life pursuing. It is evidence that Biden still possesses a politician’s most essential skill, the ability to count noses.