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President Joe Biden is down to his last week in the White House and he’s about to discover how little his half-century of service to the Democratic Party gets him once he is back on the outside.
Heading into his final days in office, Biden is rightly feeling a little chaffed if not cheated as he rides a job approval rating so bad that you have to go back to Jimmy Carter’s surveys to find someone in worse shape. (Lost to no one is the fact that Biden last week eulogized Carter, a fellow one-term Democrat shown the door amid a frustrated public in favor of a mold-breaking outsider.) California fires derailed Biden’s plans for a final foreign trip to Italy and to Vatican City. He is set Monday evening to deliver the first of two legacy-polishing speeches that won’t do much to remedy the lack of enthusiasm from his party’s base to see him transition into sage leader.
Let’s just look at the numbers. Only 37% of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing, besting Carter’s outgoing rating by about 5 points, but still way down from the 53% approval Biden had on Week One, according to polling shop FiveThirtyEight. The Associated Press-NORC poll puts Biden at 39% approval, including 72% of Democrats, down from 97% of them when he took office. More than half of Democrats—55%—said they are the same as or worse off than before Biden came to power in that AP-NORC polling. In short, no one is looking to Biden to guide a party that has now been cast as almost as much of an afterthought in official Washington as the President himself.
Since Election Day, there has been a muted—but nearly universal—grumbling about Biden’s choices, mostly since the 2022 midterms that saw Democrats fare better than expected, building up the party’s hope in holding on to the White House in 2024. Biden’s insistence that he would proceed with plans to chase another four years now seems folly, but the President himself does not share that view. In fact, in an interview published last week, Biden flatly declared he would have defeated Trump.
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden told USA Today in the lone print exit interview he accepted as he leaves office.
Giving voice to his own stubbornness only further depleted the little reservoir of goodwill for Biden inside the party. His decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, put Democrats in an almost impossible position of demanding equal treatment under the law for convicted felon Trump while trying to excuse Biden’s whitewashing of his son’s own criminal record. His awarding the nation’s top civilian honors to the likes of George Soros and Hillary Clinton came with thunderous objection from the right-wing ecosphere, and the bipartisan effort to recognize the late former Gov. George Romney—accepted by now-former Gov. and Sen. Mitt Romney—did little to balance that. (He drew better reviews for nearly emptying federal death row.)
Come Monday, Biden will be delivering the first of two farewell addresses scheduled for his last week in power. The first, to be presented at the State Department, is set to cover what his team sees as foreign policy victories on his watch. (His Democratic critics, meanwhile, are all too aware of the counters about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, a still-live Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a China that seems unchecked.) Given Biden’s years as a top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his eight years as Vice President and four as a globe-trotting President, the legacy-building set piece makes sense and the easiest to sell to a nation that is not exactly conversant in international affairs.
Biden then plans to deliver a more traditional farewell from the Oval Office Wednesday evening, before he once again trades Washington for Delaware next Monday.
Fatigue with an outgoing President is nothing new. Even some Democrats were exhausted by the time Obama made his exit with a speech delivered in Chicago, where he began his career and twice delivered winning election night remarks. (Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump played no small part in that.) George W. Bush’s final months in office were marked with managed chaos around a Wall Street meltdown, a housing crisis, and auto bailouts—so much so that even during the summer he opted to visit Africa in a piece of legacy-building rather than attend the GOP convention. And Bill Clinton’s final years in office left him leaving as a popular and even sympathetic figure, but his own VP, Al Gore, maintained an arm’s length between the two as he tried unsuccessfully to keep Democrats in the White House for a third term.
To be clear, Biden is in worse shape than all of them, at least according to polling. The public is sour on him—in part because of Democrats who blame him for saddling the country with another four years of Trump. Biden’s own loyalists are not much more keen to spend time lingering on his legacy. While White House aides and apologists insist with plenty of credibility that Biden’s legislative wins rival any of his predecessors, legacies are like the economy: you cannot overpower a gut feeling with facts. It’s how Trump won during a third run for the White House, how Obama’s message of hope and change proved effective amid the turmoil of 2008, and how Bush 43 rode a wave of decency pledges to Washington in 2000 after the scandal-soaked Clinton years.
But here’s why Biden shouldn’t be despondent: No one can say any of those three immediate predecessors saw their reputations unchanged after decamping from Washington.
In that—more than anything his talented writing staff and outside cheerleaders may put on the Teleprompter for his final attempts at historical revisionism—Biden should take a true measure of comfort. While the polling shows him at an historical low, the tape also shows plenty of room for comeback, and it often comes in short order. Gallup routinely follows-up on former Presidents in their surveys, and even the first at-bat often shows big gains: Ronald Reagan rocketed up 15 points in his first reassessment; Carter jumped 12 points; and George H.W. Bush rose 10 points. Maybe after the nation has a bit of a break from Biden, it may give him a similar second chance—albeit one that could not keep him in the job he’d dreamed of having for almost his entire life. Snap judgements—like elections themselves—sometimes get the big questions wrong.
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