Good Riddance, Joe Biden

For four years I just couldn’t understand what it was that so many people disliked about Joe Biden. In his closing weeks in office, Biden has made me see the light.

Let me be clear. Compared to what’s coming, I wish Biden would remain as President for another four years. And I really wish that Kamala Harris would be succeeding him next month. But comparing Biden to Donald Trump is ridiculous because it’s such a low bar. Jack the Ripper compares well to Donald Trump.

His actions over the last year or more have convinced me that Biden’s massive ego and his reflexive striving to obtain and hold onto power are what he’s about. Maybe he really does love the country, but if so that takes a back seat to his ambition.

I’ve long believed — and written — that Biden was too old and infirm for a second term. He ran anyway, despite his obvious frailties and his low approval ratings, because he really liked the power and trappings of the White House. Then, even after his disastrous debate performance in June, he held onto the baton so hard that I’m surprised he still has his fingernails. He finally stepped down, but not as some noble sacrifice for his party and country. He was forced out, kicking and screaming, in a brilliantly executed maneuver by Nancy Pelosi. And by all accounts, he’s still bitter about it.

Now, on his way out of office, he’s once again revealed what he’s really about by pardoning his n’er do well son who is guilty of massive tax evasion and firearms violations — two things that liberals normally abhor. In fact, Biden’s even attacked his own Justice Department for pursuing a political prosecution, which it was not.

By doing this, Biden may have done more damage to American democracy than Trump. That may strike you as an overwrought statement, but bear with me.

We now have two parties in this country, one that is not so much a party as a cult of personality. The Republicans would toss over every democratic institution and norm if Trump told them to. Biden is the leader of the other party, the party of democracy, the party that cared for and defended our institutions and our classically liberal values and rights. By pardoning his son, Biden has come close to throwing all that away. He has deeply undercut the ability of his party to push back against Trump’s banana republic.

Now, embarrassed by the fully justified pushback that he is getting, he’s decided to try to save his own legacy by expanding the pardons to a ridiculous extent. He’s considering pardoning countless people — friends and associates of his — for crimes they didn’t commit and haven’t even been prosecuted for. The American public might ask themselves why these people need to be pardoned if they didn’t do anything wrong. So, actually, pardoning innocent people makes them appear guilty.

Even if he doesn’t carry out this ludicrous notion, he’s already done a lot of damage by just entertaining the idea. And he’s entertaining the idea as a means of burying his inexcusable pardon of his son in a blizzard of pardons that he would cloak in some bogus argument about protecting the innocent. The people he might pardon are, in fact, truly innocent. Hunter Biden was not.

And it’s not like any of this is anything new for this guy. Biden has never really stood for much of anything beyond his own political survival. For example, he likes to go on about his deep Roman Catholic faith. But when the political winds switched and it was no longer viable to be a pro-life Democrat, Biden looked deep within his soul and discovered that he was pro-choice after all. Now, I’m pro-choice myself, but if a man can switch sides so easily on an issue that fundamental, it raises the question of whether he has any real moral center at all.

Even worse, in 2021, elected as a moderate who promised stability and competence, he governed like a hard-left liberal. Again, that had nothing to do with Biden’s core values, which don’t exist beyond his core value of political survival. Biden moved left because he always intended to run for a second term and he went to where the money, organization and activists are in the Democratic Party.

Because he allowed himself to become captive to the hard-left, instead of standing up to it. he pursued policies that sealed his fate — and eventually that of his Vice President. It started with the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he forced ahead on a timeline even faster than what Trump had laid down. Biden’s numbers plummeted with that and never recovered.

Then he loosened border policies, resulting in a flood of migrants that only abated when he finally woke up to the political damage it was doing — and far too late to lessen the blow taken ultimately by Harris.

And he insisted, as the hard-left did, that his COVID relief package must come in at $1.9 trillion, even as the economy was recovering rapidly. Mitt Romney offered him bipartisan support for a bill that would have come in at about a quarter of that — maybe too much even at that — but Biden refused. The result was to fuel inflation. To be sure, that was only part of the cause, which was more about pent up consumer demand, savings that were burning a hole in Americans’ pockets and supply chain issues. But that level of spending added fuel to the fire and invited blame to be heaped upon Biden, and ultimately Harris.

So, it was mostly the economy (inflation) and migration that brought Biden/Harris down. Biden’s responsible for both and he’s responsible for both because he didn’t have his own core values in place. He simply went with the political winds, which for him were storming out of the left.

Moderate Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger summed up the Biden presidency best when she said in the midst of that two trillion dollar spending spree, “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,”

Let me pause here to reflect on my broader point about Biden’s lack of a core political philosophy. Rigidity in a politician or in a human being (some will make a distinction between the two) is not a good trait — and it’s often fatal. And, show me somebody who believes just exactly what he did 20 years ago and I’ll show you somebody who needs to get out more. Politicians win elections because they trim their sails to capture the wind no matter from which direction it blows. I get that. But there does come a point where, once you’ve arrived in the port of power that all that tacking was meant to achieve, you have to stand back and take in where you are and what the country needs now. Especially for Biden, at his advanced age and having reached the pinnacle of political success, he should have been able to play that elder statesman’s role.

But, blinded by his need to just keep running, Joe Biden never understood what his job was or where he was in history. His job was to save American democracy from hard-right populism. The way to do that was to govern from the center. Instead, simply because of his reflexive desire to obtain and keep power, he followed the hard-left down to defeat.

I think four more years of Donald Trump will be a disaster. But it’s a disaster handed to us by Joe Biden. Good riddance, Joe.