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JOE BIDEN WANTED THIS  
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Branko Marcetic
July 22, 2024
Jacobin
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_ No one forced Joe Biden to run for president — or to facilitate a
genocide. His unlikely conversion to economic populism was a triumph
for the Left, but he ultimately proved his own worst enemy. _

President Joe Biden speaks at the 115th NAACP National Convention at
the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on July 16, 2024, in Las Vegas,
Nevada. , Mario Tama / Getty Images

 

The triumph and tragedy of Joe Biden’s life is that he got exactly
what he wanted.

It’s not true that he ran in 2020 because he felt duty-bound to do
so after seeing white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, though
the president has made
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the claim [[link removed]] so many
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times he may now truly believe it. According to multiple
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accounts
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Biden and his team originally filmed an announcement video outside his
childhood home in Scranton stressing his working-class roots, before
scrapping it and seizing on Charlottesville as a rationale.

The White House was a boyhood dream; he wrote about it in the sixth
grade [[link removed]]. He was talking
about the presidency before he was elected to anything, and as early
as 1976 [[link removed]], four years into
his first Senate term, after he had shocked the state of Delaware with
an insurgent, youth-driven campaign that no one, not even he himself,
expected to have the legs it did. But sometimes dreams come with a
price.

Biden surely did not imagine his career would end like this: one of
the most unpopular presidents in history, forced out by his own party,
after a weekend spent reportedly
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fuming in private at his betrayal, as one prominent Democrat after
another abandoned him — all on the back of weeks of the entire
country openly discussing, sometimes mocking, his mental competency.
This is not how successful presidencies are supposed to end.

Democrats are heaping plaudits on Biden for the “heroism” he
showed in deciding to step down, in the hope of emotionally smoothing
his way out. But though he may bask in this public face-saving
campaign that’s been launched for his benefit, it will do little to
take out the sting. After all, more than anyone, Biden is aware this
was never his decision.

Though he joins the ignominious one-term-presidents club, Biden can at
least say he has outdone his peers in one key presidential category:
bloodshed overseas. Finally achieving his political ambitions meant
carrying out one the most heinous presidential crimes in a generation,
worse than anything Donald Trump actually did and rivaled this century
only by George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a human and geopolitical
disaster that Biden also had no small part
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in engineering.

The final project of Biden’s presidency, the very last act of his
public life, was stubbornly facilitating a human extermination
campaign in Gaza so savage, people who have spent their lives watching
the worst that humanity is capable of have run out of
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novel ways to describe the horrors they are seeing there. As
Democratic paeans to Biden’s honor and decency dutifully flow in,
the total number of dead in Gaza has been put at 186,000 at minimum
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext]
by the _Lancet_.

After a life marked by the shocking, tragic death of his wife and
infant daughter, Biden has ended up devoting nearly a quarter of his
presidency to inflicting this same suffering on an entire people, many
times over: not just children and parents killed, but entire families
and bloodlines annihilated. He has done so against all reason and
sense, not to mention unprecedented objections from experts and career
diplomats within his own government. Besides a moral disaster, it has
been a political one, sending US standing on a downward tumble
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Iraq debacle and making the United States a potential target for
terrorist violence again, one of the all-time self-inflicted defeats
by a great power.

 
It was the bloody culmination of a remarkably destructive career,
which saw Biden climb the political ladder over forty years, rung by
rung, often by treading on the poor and marginalized below him: from
helping kick-start the country’s mass-incarceration crisis and
restricting abortion rights to playing a leading role in the Iraq
disaster and helping the hard-right and now corruption-stained
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Clarence Thomas
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get on the Supreme Court.

But for a brief window, Biden the man nearly redeemed himself.

Whether he knows it or not — and based on the case he desperately
made for himself the past weeks, Biden views esoteric foreign-policy
matters like NATO expansion and AUKUS as his most important
accomplishments — Biden’s presidency, in a strange twist of
history, ended up playing a vital role in the ongoing political
transformation of the country. Against all odds, Biden — a
career-long conservative who welcomed the election of Ronald Reagan,
voted for NAFTA, and once said
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that “[Bill] Clinton got it right” when he rejected “class
warfare and populism” — advanced the fortunes of an organized left
that he had never cared for.

Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden made amends with his socialist
rival Bernie Sanders and brought him and some of his supporters into
the fold. He adopted at least some of Sanders’s political program
and ran, however half-heartedly and haltingly, one of the more
progressive Democratic presidential campaigns in recent memory (a low
bar, but still) — and won. He gained control of the Senate by
promising to send checks directly to every American. He armed his
administration with progressive trustbusters and allies of organized
labor, and became outspokenly pro-union, becoming the first sitting US
president to join a picket line and basking in the praise from many
quarters as the most pro-labor president in nearly a century
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The career-long deficit hawk and bipartisan obsessive passed a bigger
stimulus than his former boss had on a party-line vote and was
rewarded with the best approval numbers of his presidency. For a
moment, he seemed poised to make real the customary
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campaign-season Franklin Delano Roosevelt comparisons, as his
immensely popular “human infrastructure” proposal — a major,
long-overdue expansion of the US welfare state, and one crafted
largely by Sanders — promised to, if not undo, at least make up for
the profound damage Biden had inflicted in the course of getting to
where he was.

And then he did what he had expressly said
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would be a mistake, splitting that bill in two, frittering away months
on getting bipartisan Republican buy-in for its own sake, and dooming
the ambitious proposal. As so often in his career, Biden proved his
own worst enemy.

There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of
Biden’s populism. This is, after all, a president who
nickel-and-dimed
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Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned
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promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters
weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative
pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded
unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better
legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually
become law, when the reality is it died — and did so in large part
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because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher
priority.

That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive
economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of
the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in
dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version
of its political program. It did so not just through political
pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent
that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for
political power came to realize there _was_ a popular constituency for
a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically,
crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an
honest-to-God shot.

That Biden fell short of doing so is a tragedy, not just for the Left
and for the millions of Americans who continue to struggle paycheck to
paycheck, but for the man himself. For all the death and carnage he
has caused, it was hard not to feel a pang of pity for Biden as his
reelection ambitions fell apart last week: his presidency in tatters,
abandoned by his allies, and struggling
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to get in a car as he labored under the COVID he had contracted at the
lowest point in his presidency. It’s only human.

But we needn’t trouble ourselves too much. Nobody asked Biden to run
in 2020 — his own former boss asked
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fact — nor was he the only candidate who could have beaten Trump. In
fact, as his own advisors privately admitted
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it was not Biden who saved the country from Trump, but Biden who was
saved from humiliating defeat, by a lucky combination of the pandemic,
an undisciplined Trump, and the very
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progressive
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activists
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he spent his life disdaining. More to the point, he was more than
willing to plow ahead and go along with his team’s elaborate efforts
to hide his decline, and risk taking his party, his colleagues, and
the country over the cliff’s edge with him as long as he got to be
in the driver’s seat.
For better or worse, Joe Biden wanted this. Sometimes the greatest
curse is that we get what we want.

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Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

* Joe Biden; US Politics;
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