During his more than half-century of service, Joe Biden became one of the last living links between a Washington that barely exists any longer—the post-World War II era of bold U.S. internationalism—and the new Washington of populist neoprotectionism and anti-interventionism.
As president, deploying superb political instincts honed over 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president, Biden managed to bridge those two eras with great agility. On one hand, for example, he revitalized and strengthened NATO in the face of Russian aggression; on the other, he developed an unprecedented industrial policy focused on restoring America’s working class. Thus, overall, Biden left behind an enviable legacy of legislative achievement and global leadership that met the demands of both internationalists and populists—many of them anyway—and will no doubt rank his single term quite high in the estimation of historians. The only exception would be his ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
All Biden lacked, in the end, was time. After weeks of intense pressure from his own party to step down because of his age and faltering performance, the 81-year-old president announced Sunday that he would not run for reelection after all. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, instantly scrambling the presidential race in unprecedented ways with a little more than three months to go.
Much depends on whether Harris can prevail against former President Donald Trump in November, historians and experts agree. But like Biden, she has been dogged by low approval ratings.
“Biden has now lived up to his promise of being a bridge to a new generation of Democrats, if haltingly,” said Sidney Milkis, a historian at the University of Virginia. “But the fate of his legacy now rests with Kamala Harris, just as Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy rested with Harry Truman’s success. If she loses and Trump comes in and erases a lot of what he did, then his legacy won’t be as enduring as it might have been.”
Biden’s departure from the race comes after an agonizing, almost Shakespearian drama in which a King Lear-like president appeared to be in denial about just how precarious his position was and how much his party no longer had confidence in him. This played out in the weeks since his disastrous June 27 debate with Trump—a moment when all the swirling doubts about Biden’s age came into grim focus during a stammering, nearly incoherent performance.
Day after day, more senior Democrats came out calling for Biden’s withdrawal—prompting the president to declare defiantly that he was running no matter what. In a signal moment on July 11, Biden was asked why he had decided to run for a second term after suggesting in 2020 that he might be satisfied with merely being a “bridge” to the next generation.
“What changed was the gravity of the situation I inherited in terms of the economy, our foreign policy, and domestic division,” he said. Then Biden harked back to his long career in Washington—one of his first votes as a young senator involved ending the Vietnam War—and said his “wisdom” more than compensated for his advanced age.
“Most presidential historians give me credit for having accomplished more than most any president since [Lyndon] Johnson and maybe before that to get major pieces of legislation passed,” Biden said. “And what I realized was, my long time in the Senate had equipped me to have the wisdom to know how to deal with the Congress to get things done.”
Michael Haltzel, Biden’s former senior advisor in the Senate, said his old boss was, in all things, a doggedly hard worker who, despite his personal shortcomings, managed to win many admirers on both sides of the aisle. And on both economics and geopolitics, he achieved the sorts of conceptual breakthroughs that neither of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, could.
“I think historians in the future will rate him very, very high,” Haltzel said. “He cleaned up the total chaos and mess that was Donald Trump’s four years. Number 2, he put into place policies that enabled an economic recovery that was faster and more comprehensive than anybody had right to expect. His job creation was astonishing. … With inflation coming down, he’s managed to come pretty close to squaring that circle. And finally he restored our standing in the world.”
Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Biden’s rebuilding of NATO was only part of what he did to shore up America’s leadership position. Faced with a rising and often belligerent China, “his building of Indo-Pacific partnerships such as AUKUS [the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] and bringing the Indo-Pacific and trans-Atlantic communities closer together was new and absolutely vital to the world we’re facing,” said Daalder, who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Biden’s long experience spanning from Vietnam to Iraq also made him leery of putting U.S. boots on the ground, however. As a result, he was one of the first senior officials to see that the vastly expensive, more than decade-long counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan was failing. Unfortunately, Biden proved so eager to get out that he embraced Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban, which bypassed the Afghan government entirely and led to a swift takeover by the Islamist militants.
But Biden rarely stumbled after that. As Biden’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me in 2021, what came to be known as “Bidenomics”—a blend of industrial policy and an inward-looking trade policy that continued many of the Trump tariffs—came out of decades of experience in observing the fallacies of his predecessors. Bernstein said Biden had long believed U.S. global leadership to be entirely dependent its economic leadership—and that this edge was lost through decades of obsessive deficit reduction, leading to rapidly declining public investment that hammered the middle class. “He’s enacting a set of core principles that he’s carried with him forever,” Bernstein said.
In this regard, Biden ironically outstripped even Obama—whom Biden came to resent for shunting him aside in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the party’s choice in 2016. Both Obama and Clinton ended up embracing much of the post-Reaganite so-called neoliberal consensus in favor of smaller government, lower corporate taxes, and tighter budgets. At one point, Obama even admitted to a group of economists that it was hard “to change the narrative after 30 years.”
But Biden did change it. Jim Greene, another former Senate advisor to Biden, told me in a 2021 interview that the president’s thinking was shaped by the opening of China in the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which suddenly thrust millions of new low-wage workers into competition with U.S. workers. “He knew that would put U.S. labor on the back foot,” Greene said. Biden was even then developing his own version of the sort of proto-populism that Trump and—to a differing degree—Sen. Bernie Sanders later embraced, watching in dismay as his Senate colleagues did little to invest in retraining and upgrading America’s workforce. The result was that while productivity and GDP surged, middle-class incomes did not.
Biden at the same time managed to fulfill the expectations of the postwar consensus in favor of U.S. global leadership—the United States was still the “indispensable nation,” he liked to say, quoting former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “Biden really was the last of that generation,” said Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, the interim president of Freedom House.
Referring to the new consensus he was building during his news conference at the NATO summit on July 11, Biden said, “The Cold War is over. The postwar era is over. What is going to replace it? And I respectfully suggest, I have a pretty good idea of what that should be. I’ve convinced a lot of people to follow it.”
Now Biden is abruptly handing off the torch of his legacy to Harris. Notably, Harris was quickly endorsed by both Clintons, but Obama has so far remained silent. In a statement, Harris said she intended to “earn and win this nomination.”
“With this selfless and patriotic act, President Biden is doing what he has done throughout his life of service: putting the American people and our country above everything else,” Harris said.
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