WEDNESDAY: How will President Biden be remembered?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2025

Also, how did we earn our way out? Even as we've "moved on" with our subject matter this week, we haven't abandoned this important basic belief:

Those of us in Blue America need to develop a stronger sense of how and why we lost the last election. 

More pungently, we need to develop a stronger sense of the ways we Blues may have earned our way out—of the ways we may have managed to drive voters away over the past five or six decades, but also in just the last handful of years.

How did we lose to a guy like Trump? All too often, we Blues seem to have no earthly idea. That led to an interesting discussion on this morning's Morning Joe—a discussion featuring Ed Luce, U.S. national editor at the Financial Times.

You can see the videotape of the segment here. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, the videotape appears at the Morning Joe site beneath this challenging headline:

History will remember Biden as being the "bridge back to Trump." argues writer

Ouch! Is that how President Biden will be remembered? The conversation was trigged by Luce's new column for the FT, with which we largely (though not totally) agree.

Luce's column triggered a solid discussion. Dual headline included, the column starts like this:

Joe Biden’s tragic curtain call
Hubris kept him too long in the presidential race and he will be remembered chiefly for easing Trump’s return

If the essence of Greek tragedy is that the hero is undone by his flaws, Joe Biden gets star billing. He defeated Donald Trump, stood up to Russia, enacted more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and bequeaths a robust economy. That made Biden a hero to America’s left and beyond. Yet most of his achievements will now be erased. His legacy is Trump’s return. After Biden, the deluge. He largely has himself to blame. 

The Greek tragic hero’s defect is hubris. Last week, Biden said he could have won the 2024 election had he stayed in the race. This was in spite of the fact that just 27 per cent of Americans last June thought he had the cognitive ability to be president again. It is likelier that Trump would have won a far bigger victory. Whatever blame Kamala Harris deserves, her vote came within 1.5 percentage points of Trump’s.

Much has yet to be reported about the conspiracy of silence around Biden’s waning capacities. Though he was shielded from press conferences and other unscripted events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was in decline. Biden’s inner cabinet of family and longtime aides should take some of the blame. It was also a media failing. The rare journalist who blew the whistle risked loss of access and ostracism on liberal social media. 

But the buck stops with Biden. Had he redeemed his vow to be a one-term “bridge” to the post-Trump era, the Democratic party would have had time to find a stronger candidate than Harris—someone who could have distanced themselves from what was unpopular about Biden’s economy. Instead, an isolated Biden was cut off from public sentiment...

Will President Biden be remembered as the person who let Trump return to power? We don't know the answer to that, but we'd say it's entirely possible.

We agree with Luce about that possibility. We're less inclined to blame Biden himself for the way he initially stayed in the race, then left in late July.

Why are we less inclined than Luce to blame President Biden himself? Simple! If he was affected by cognitive decline—since August 2023, it has seemed to us that he probably was—we don't know the extent to which he can be blamed for his failure to exercise better judgment. 

With respect to that apparent decline, we agree with Luce when he says that a lot of reporting remains to be done—reporting about those within the Biden camp, but also about those within the mainstream press corps.

We don't know what that reporting would show. Moving right along, we'd say this:

In our view, a great deal remains to be said about the various (possible) ways we Blues (may have) lost votes in the past several years—about the various ways we may have earned our way out.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are disinclined to blame ourselves when things go disastrously wrong. Keeping that basic fact in mind, how did we manage to lose to Candidate Donald J. Trump? 

In our view, it isn't as simple as saying that everyone's racist but us. In our view, the possible answers are many. It just isn't that simple at all.

Luce's column triggered a lively discussion on Morning Joe. (Early warnings from David Ignatius and Ezra Klein were mentioned.) We hope many more such discussions will follow.

In our view, we Blues have been earning our way out over the course of the past sixty years. We ourselves were physically present when this whole thing started, way back in the fall of '65. 

In November, all this unwise tribal behavior finally hit the fan. We Blues need to discuss our roads to defeat. This morning's Morning Joe provided a bit of a start.