Assessing the Biden presidency

Many legislative successes, but a political failure and not an approach to be repeated

Tomorrow, we will be starting another four years of Trump, assuming he willingly leaves in 2029. Since we would be getting a new president no matter who won last year, this is something I would probably be writing about around this time anyway. In light of Trump winning, though, these kinds of pieces are being written much more frequently than they would have been had Harris won. Unsurprisingly, given the election’s outcome, most of the post-mortems of Biden’s tenure that I’ve seen have been sharply critical. There is a lot of merit to it and I have plenty of criticisms, but it’s not like every decision he made was bad and he definitely had some big accomplishments.

Biden succeeded at a lot of things during his term and much of it was bipartisan. Of all the promises he made in 2020, restoring bipartisanship was one he was able to keep. I think that’s the best thing to come from his tenure. Even with all the partisanship we have, our government still is capable of passing legislation when it wants to.

Obviously, his age was a huge problem and would have been a reason for him to not run again regardless of anything else going on. But even if he was younger and energetic, he was still going to be plagued by inflation just like incumbents all over the world have been. There has long been a debate over how much his policies contributed to it, but, politically, it doesn’t matter. Inflation happened on his watch and so it was blamed on him.

Contrasting Biden/Harris losing with Obama winning, I have seen many conclude that voters hate inflation more than they hate unemployment. We can’t know for sure given the small sample size, but I don’t think that’s quite right. The biggest difference between Biden and Obama is that the financial crisis didn’t happen on the latter’s watch. It was a drag on him throughout his presidency, but because it didn’t begin when he was on office he wasn’t blamed for it. Biden was not so lucky in that inflation began when he was in office.

There were things he could have done differently, but it’s not obvious it would have been enough for Harris to win. Given that inflation has been a global problem, there is no universe where it wouldn’t have been a problem for both of them. No matter which decisions he made, inflation was going to be the defining economic problem of his presidency.

My writings during Biden’s tenure

I started blogging during the 2020 campaign and so have a record to look at covering Biden’s time in office. Looking back at what I wrote, there is somewhat of a pattern. It begins by praising his efforts at stimulating the economy and making sure vaccines were widely available. Starting in the summer of 2021, I became more critical. That was when the Delta variant showed up and his administration soiled themselves and didn’t know what to do. I think Biden made the right call on many things, but the handling of the pandemic once it became clear vaccines wouldn’t eliminate transmission was something he really dropped the ball on.

Around the same time the Delta variant showed up, Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. I defended the decision at the time and I stand by it today. We had been there for two decades and enough was enough. Of all the things I hated about those few weeks, it was seeing every single media outlet drop any pretense of reporting and straight up editorialize. Reporters and others who for years had not given a single thought about Afghanistan suddenly cared passionately about it. After they had succeeded at tanking Biden’s approval rating and ensuring no president will ever withdraw from a war again, they went back to not caring.

I remember during that time hearing, both in person and online, predictions that we would have terrorist attacks here because of our leaving there. Well, it’s been three years since we left and no such attacks have happened. I wonder how many of those people are rethinking their prognostication skills? I suspect the answer is none. They probably don’t even remember they predicted it.

Pivoting back to domestic issues, I was very unhappy with how Biden and congressional Democrats were handling Build Back Better. The reality was very simple. Democrats had the bare minimum of 50 seats in the Senate and Joe Manchin was the decider. Nothing could pass without his support, no Democrat had any leverage over him and no magic trick was going to get around that. Despite that, Biden spent most of his time trying to placate his party’s left-wing and acted as if Manchin didn’t exist.

I wrote critically not just about Biden’s lack of leadership during late 2021 and into 2022, but also of Chuck Schumer’s. For the latter, I did write a mea culpa after several pieces of legislation were passed and Biden’s agenda came back from the dead. Ultimately, Biden did make the right call in supporting what became the Inflation Reduction Act, but the process of getting there was needlessly bumpy and nearly resulted in nothing getting enacted.

I wrote in Joe Manchin’s defense several times and I think that has aged very well. Democrats were very fortunate to have him there, but for months ignored what he was asking them to do. I wrote last month about changes I think Democrats should make going forward and the BBB saga is emblematic of why. The biggest problems Democrats have had at all levels of government are being unwilling to say no to any of their coalition members and a refusal to set priorities.

BBB had both of those problems. What was passed by the House in 2021 and killed by Manchin was not a serious bill. It was every single Democratic group’s wish list all stuffed together and temporarily funded. Had it passed it was going to cause a spike in inflation, provoke a backlash from voters and wind up expiring in a few years all because Biden was unwilling to say no to anyone in his party and to prioritize anything. Manchin made it clear he didn’t support doing everything and wanted to do a few things and do them well. Eventually, he and Schumer came up with the IRA, which did that and was a big improvement.

After the IRA was passed, my writings became more praiseworthy of Biden. When Democrats did unexpectedly well in the midterms, I became much more enthusiastic about him and his running for reelection. Looking back at my 2023 writings, I didn’t write about Biden nearly as frequently as I did in 2021 and 2022. I wrote plenty about the economy and how unusual it was and even wrote about foreign policy a decent amount.

On foreign policy, I think Biden made many good decisions, particularly with respect to China. I thought it was good that he was trying to build and strengthen alliances in Asia, particularly where it concerned Japan and South Korea. I thought he was right to support Ukraine and to push to give them as much as aid as possible. If anything, he was too cautious about it and restricted the use of weapons more than he should have.

Foreign policy is Biden’s strong suit. It was where he focused most of his attention during his time in the Senate. He could easily have been Secretary of State if he hadn’t been VP. As president, that is where he focused the most on the details. Unlike Clinton and Obama, he’s not a policy wonk and never has been. He’s much more of a dealmaker and consensus builder. Like everything, that has its pluses and minuses, but career Senators tend to be that way.

An accidental president

This piece argues that Biden’s unwillingness to say no to anyone in his party was the central feature of his presidency and the reason why it ended poorly. I wouldn’t be that harsh, but it has validity. Many attribute Biden’s unwillingness to say no to anyone in his party as being part of some kind of conspiracy (he’s controlled by the left!) or because of his age, but I don’t agree with that. The roots of it can be traced back to the 2020 primary and even before then.

The biggest thing to understand about Biden’s presidency is that it wasn’t meant to be. He wasn’t supposed to run for president in 2020. When he did run, he wasn’t supposed to be nominated. When he was nominated, he wasn’t supposed to win.

Even after winning the general election, Republicans were supposed to keep control of the Senate. In large part because of Trump screaming about election fraud, a small, but significant number of Republicans sat out in the Georgia runoffs and the two Democrats unexpectedly won. With the barest majority, Biden was able to accomplish a considerable amount, but it wasn’t supposed to go that way.

As I mentioned in my last post, Biden is unusual among presidents in that he has no fanatical following and doesn’t excite anyone. There have been plenty of presidential nominees like that such as Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hilary Clinton. What they all share in common is they lost. Biden has much more in common with them than he does with Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump.

Biden won the nomination in 2020 entirely by default. That’s in sharp contrast to Obama and Trump. Obama won in 2008 by being a once in a century talent strong enough to go from largely unknown to beating the Clinton machine. Trump shattered what so many believed about Republican primary voters and what they really wanted. He understood that nobody cares about the size of government and that the party establishment was hated by rank-and-file voters. The other candidates running completely missed that, which left a huge void that Trump filled.

To be fair to Biden, he did lead in almost every primary poll taken throughout 2019 and in 2020. His candidacy wasn’t a joke and he did have a lot of goodwill from Democratic primary voters by virtue of having been Obama’s VP. Still, very few people were eager to vote for him. He got lucky in that other candidates who could have been the frontrunner never caught fire. He also avoided some pitfalls that others did not such as going way out into left-field.

Biden wasn’t many peoples’ first choice, but he wound up being the only alternative to nominating Bernie Sanders, which nobody in Democratic Party circles wanted. That’s why Democratic Party actors of all sorts quickly coalesced around him when it was clear it was him or bust. It wasn’t because they were thrilled about him, it was because they didn’t want to throw the election away. Speaking from personal experience, I voted for him in the primary and thought he ran a good campaign in the general election, but I would have preferred Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bennet.

Winning the nomination by default and having no loyal fan base meant Biden felt like he owed everyone something. Whether it was the more left-wing part of his party or the more moderate wing, he felt the need to cater to all of them and to make not upsetting anyone his top concern. That was true on the campaign trail and it remained true during his time as president.

In his defense, because he was governing with a bare majority during his first two years, he needed to keep everyone happy to some degree. The problem is he wound up spending way too much time trying to placate the left when he needed to placate Manchin and other moderates in his party. Of course, the more left-wing House members sometimes threatened to vote against things if they didn’t get their way. That’s the same kind of threat they made when the Affordable Care Act was being debated in 2009-10. Like with the ACA, every House member from the left voted for the IRA even though it was a long way from what they wanted.

That’s just what they do. They make all kinds of threats, but in the end will take something over nothing. That’s something the next Democratic president should remember. Whenever there is a clash between the party’s left-wing and its more moderate wing, the latter wins every time. In other words, the left can be ignored and taken for granted and the focus needs to be on pleasing moderate members and those from swing states and districts.

The biggest problem

Biden is a very cautious and risk averse person. Most people who make a career in politics are like that. It requires finding the lowest common denominator and pleasing many people and groups. It’s not something where rugged individualism will get you very far. Disruptive innovations can be great for the economy, but politics isn’t a profession where that’s a thing.

His wanting to not upset anyone is understandable, but it’s not sustainable and is not something Democrats in positions of power now and in the future should emulate. While Biden was able to get a lot of legislation enacted, implementing it has proven to be tough. Allocating money to spend on infrastructure, semiconductors and clean energy is great, but is only the beginning. Red tape is blocking things from being built and Biden sometimes wound up creating a lot more of it in the name of trying to please various Democratic constituencies.

What has been getting attention lately is the billions allocated towards broadband access in the infrastructure bill passed in 2021. Despite the money given towards it, nothing has been built. There are many reasons for that, but part of it is because Biden attached all kinds of additional requirements for the money to be given out that have nothing to do with broadband. A glacially slow rollout has plagued the money given to electric vehicle charging stations, too.

As part of the many spending initiatives he signed, Biden sometimes tried to accomplish other goals that were unrelated and caused delays. Other times, he was unwilling to address the red tape that was already in place. For example, the IRA is going to be limited in its reach because of permitting laws. He was aware of that, but never took a position in favor of the permitting reform bills that were debated in Congress. Why? Because he didn’t want to upset environmental groups.¹

The fear of upsetting environmental groups is what kept Biden from boasting about his efforts to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to encourage oil companies to keep drilling. To the extent the SPR keeps oil flowing and prevents a price spike, Biden did a very good job of using it. He just never mentioned it nor did he mention that oil and gas production was at a record high on his watch. Harris, to her credit, did mention the latter when she was campaigning, but by then it was too late.

On inflation, I think Biden made the right call in going big in early 2021. Where he erred was during his last two years. A big success story of Biden’s tenure was employment. Job growth has been very strong, much faster than after the financial crisis. Biden boasted about it plenty and he was right to do so.

But once employment had fully recovered, the concern was no longer about jobs. Biden needed to pivot to focus on prices and, by and large, he didn’t. It was always going to be the Fed who did the bulk of the work in bringing inflation down, but Biden wasn’t helpless. He needed to focus on efficiency and to avoid doing things that would contribute to inflation, but wound up mostly doing the opposite.

In trying to placate the left, Biden spent a ton of time and energy focusing on student debt relief. Not only does that contribute to inflation, but it was not a priority for voters, including young people. Biden didn’t just focus on something people weren’t into, he also publicized it extensively. He was effectively telling voters that he didn’t share their concerns.

It’s common to hear complaints about media coverage being negative. There’s a lot of truth to that, but it’s no excuse. The president doesn’t have a monopoly on communications, but they still have a big platform. If they want to do things and publicize them, they absolutely can. Biden mostly chose to not do things that would demonstrate concern about prices. When he did do things to reduce inflation, like use the SPR, he never talked about it. That was a decision on his part and not something that can be blamed on others.

Biden’s being deferential to the left was frustrating in so many ways and I wrote about it plenty. He treated them so much better than they deserved and in return got nothing. The most irritating example was the environmental crowd. Environmental groups wanted a president who prioritized climate change and they got one. Rather than being grateful for the IRA and working to help Biden get reelected, they immediately started making new demands.

One of the worst decisions Biden made was pausing the approval of LNG export terminals. The practical effect of it was zero because tons of terminals have already been approved, more than will likely ever be built. But it was a terrible move because it rewarded awful behavior by groups acting in bad faith. It validated their dead end approach of trying to block fossil fuel projects from going forward and encouraged them to make more demands, which they promptly did.

No discussion of Biden’s mistakes is complete without mentioning immigration. One of his first acts was undoing many of the policies put in place by Trump. It was against his better judgment and something I wrote about at the time. He felt the need to placate immigration advocacy groups and didn’t want to tell them no and so he wound up contributing to a surge in border crossings that became a huge liability for him and other Democrats.

Being unwilling to say no to coalition members proved to be especially bad because in practice it meant Biden spent the bulk of his time catering to the left when his problem was with voters in the center. Whatever groups on the left wanted, they tended to get no matter how irrelevant it was to everyone else.² On cultural issues, Biden himself is hardly woke, but his administration was staffed at the lower levels by many who are and they pushed the envelope on issues like transgender athletes and gender affirming care for minors. Those are both very overstated in their electoral importance, but they still mattered at the margins in contributing to the perception of Biden being left-wing.

That’s another mistake Biden made from the beginning that made him more left-wing then he intended to be. His cabinet and high level appointees were largely a normal, standard Democratic group. The lower and middle level hires were often a different story. A significant number of them came from Elizabeth Warren’s world and they had a big influence on many decisions made at places that are less high profile, but still very important, i.e., the FTC and SEC. Unlike in the Clinton and Obama administrations, very few people with business backgrounds worked in Biden’s administration. That in part reflected a deliberate effort by Warren to keep away anyone with that kind of background.

I think it’s safe to say the effort to be less business friendly was very unsuccessful. It alienated many people in the business world, most notably in the tech sector, while not winning any new converts. It also elevated bad ideas like a company being big is per se bad. On top of that, it gave credence to the false belief that coming from a non-profit or academic background is morally superior to working in business. That kind of mentality is something the next Democratic president should avoid like the plague. If anything, he/she should not hire anyone from the left-wing non-profit world and keep academic hires to a minimum.

The good news going forward is the problems Biden had with always trying to please everyone can be solved fairly easily. What it will require is for the next Democratic president to be someone who excites people and has a forceful presence. I have no idea who that person is, but I’m sure he/she is out there. Having a fanatical following and a forceful presence will give him/her the freedom to move towards the center and not have to worry about placating the party’s most ideological wing or any other group. That was something Clinton and Obama were both able to do and is usually something presidents can do.

1. One exception to that was a permitting reform bill Biden signed specifically related to semiconductor manufacturing. It was good that he signed it, but most Democrats in Congress opposed it and, of course, so did the usual suspects in the environmental crowd.

2. The one big exception to Biden’s tendency to cater to the left was Israel. That’s something Biden has long cared about and is very knowledgeable of and is not going to just give left-wing groups whatever they want on it.