Joe Biden’s place in history depends on Kamala Harris’s success
THE DEMOCRATS came to their convention in Chicago to praise Joe Biden, and to bury him. No one wanted to dwell on the recent unpleasantness, on how a handful of party eminences pried the nomination from his clenched hands like so many adult children compelling their fading father to surrender the car keys. Suddenly, it was hard to find anyone who thought nominating Mr Biden again, at the age of 81, was ever a good idea, no matter how many Democratic officials used to insist it was. By the time the convention began on August 19th the last of Joe Biden’s many campaigns had come to seem sad, even scary, certainly embarrassing: time to leave it behind.
Mr Biden is playing along, consummate politician that he is. Just a few weeks ago he was railing against “elites in the party” who thought they knew the voters better than he did. When the convention opened less than a month had passed since he yielded the nomination to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who his own aides had been saying would be a weaker candidate. But Mr Biden has come to accept his new role. It is a familiar one, as supporting player to a more charismatic politician, one who may not have lived as much history but unlike him could make it.
In Chicago the delegates chanted “thank you, Joe”, and Mr Biden gave every appearance of basking in their backhanded gratitude for his enforced act of self-sacrifice, with its implicit reminder they no longer wanted him for the job. “He showed what it means to be a true patriot,” Hillary Clinton declared, ushering Mr Biden into the past tense as she went on to say, “And now we are writing a new chapter in American history.”
The president even delivered his own eulogy, though he was elbowed into well after prime viewing hours for American television. It lacked the grace the moment called for and he himself deserved. His aides had said he would look ahead and make the case for Ms Harris, and he did. But he spent far more time recounting his accomplishments.
His tone was forceful and even angry, as has been true of most of his speeches in the past year; it is as though this once wildly riffing performer has become stuck at the sombre end of the keyboard. He insisted that he was not aggrieved. “I love the job, but I love my country more,” he said. “All this talk about how I’m angry at all the people who said I should step down, it’s not true.” Then he left the convention, with plans to disappear on holiday to southern California.
How hard it must be for a man so sensitive to disrespect or dishonour. Biographers of Mr Biden have noted he still remembers the names of children who humiliated him in primary school. Back then they treated him as stupid and called him “Joe Impedimenta” (the nuns drilled them all in Latin) or “Bye-Bye” because of the stutter he fights to this day. Even once he finally became president, Mr Biden kept noting that the man he had served as vice-president, Barack Obama, preferred Ms Clinton to him as the party’s standard-bearer in 2016, though, as Mr Biden also liked to say, he would have won. Now Mr Obama, the friend Mr Biden served so loyally, had reportedly once again expressed a lack of faith in him, contributing to his displacement from the ticket.
But despite, or because of, Mr Biden’s many tribulations, self-pity has never been one of his flaws. “No one owes you anything,” he likes to quote his father as having said. “You gotta get up.” And Mr Biden needs Ms Harris to win. Not only does he believe, as he warned the delegates, that Mr Trump threatens “the very soul of America”, but his own place in history rides on her success. For all his concern about democratic institutions, Mr Biden failed in a fundamental task of an institutional leader, properly preparing the way for a successor and stepping aside at the right moment to ensure continuity. If Ms Harris loses her whirlwind campaign, Mr Biden will bear the responsibility.
Mr Biden is back to playing the “transition” president he once promised to be, having tried to become a transformational one. He has often said, as he did again at the convention, that he came out of semi-retirement in 2019 in order to run a third time for president to stop Donald Trump. But he began to see a chance to accomplish Democratic goals on a scale not achieved since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House. Maybe the sense of economic and social crisis created by the covid-19 pandemic and the attack of January 6th 2021 caused Mr Biden to raise his ambitions. More likely it was just his nature. A certain audacity has characterised his politics since, at 29, he launched his first Senate campaign against a popular incumbent, renting the biggest ballroom in Delaware for his victory party when he was at 3% in the polls. He won; Mr Biden has never been beaten by a Republican, only, as now, by Democrats.
Did not go gentle
From years before that first Senate race, Mr Biden had envisioned himself as president, and by the time he got the job at last he was impatient to make the most of it. He succeeded in passing more far-reaching legislation, including some with more bipartisan support, than even his supporters imagined possible at a time of deep polarisation in American politics. His term, he told the delegates in Chicago, was “one of the most extraordinary four years of progress ever. Period.”
But he put all of it at risk. He kept Mr Trump’s most potent issue warm for him by ignoring the crisis at the southern border for two years, and then he made the hubristic choice to run one more time. Still, he, and the country, could prove lucky. A victory by Ms Harris may yet affirm the image he tried to project in Chicago, of a forward-looking, generous leader—even, in the end, a transformational one, in part because of the vice-president he chose. ■
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