Thanks for the Times of London essay on how will Biden be remembered. I found it interesting and well written but unbalanced in trying both to be somewhat hagiographic in refusing to see the “dark Brandon” side of Biden and criticizing him only within the framework of a tragic figure who has fallen. A problem here is that in at least the classical notion of tragedy the person who falls, falls from greatness. Here it’s a fall from mediocrity at best. (Not that Biden hasn’t had tragedy in his life.)
I wanted to note a paragraph or two that struck me, but, indulge and forgive me, what I wanted became a galloping horse.
1, Biden has always been more likely to quote his mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, than Lincoln, but the essential point is the same. “My mother’s creed is the American creed: no one is better than you. You are everyone’s equal, and everyone is equal to you.”
This is pious tripe imo. And it’s precisely at the heart of woke, which has captured Biden in his presidency. Hence his various institutional DEI moves, picking Harris as VP for one, and insisting that the judge replacing Ginsburg had to be a black woman, (who says she doesn’t know what a woman is.) Under this sensibility, we have seen among other unlovelinesses: the notion of merit encroached upon; the prioritizing of equality of outcome over that of opportunity; racial and gender fetishism; and a tendency to an overweening policing of opposition that included institutionally monitoring speech as seen on pre-Musk X, lawfare against Trump and so villifying him and Republicans as to increase America’s deep divide.
I had two main reasons for preferring Trump, wokeness and Israel. My just above comments reflect some of my concerns with the former.
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2, As Biden told the tale, he had been compelled to run one last time by President Trump’s inability to distinguish right from wrong, even when one side — as in the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — was spewing racist hate.
A little dark Brandon here, though not nearly the darkest, as well as Smith’s ignorance or disingenuousness. I fear the latter. It’s been shown by neutral truth tellers that Trump in Charlottesville wasn’t calling neo Nazis “good people”. He was referring to those who in good faith wanted the statuary up and those who in good faith wanted it down. Neither side was spewing racist hate. The neo Nazis were.
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3, Like an over-the-hill heavyweight, Biden could not resist one last fight against his old enemy. And then his own team pulled him away, knowing he no longer had the strength to win.
This is buffed up. It was pure ego and his and his obnoxious wife’s desire to cling to power despite his initial position that he was going to be a one termer. They, and those who egged him on, didn’t try to dissuade him, knew he was sliding badly cognitively. What the hell were they thinking? It certainly wasn’t what was good for America.
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3, Born into the world FDR made, Biden has fought all his life to defend it. As he sees it, it is a world in which international institutions shaped by the US try to sustain global stability, and its aim is an America in which the rich guys don’t get to push the ordinary Joes around.
In other ways, as the political scientist Robert C Lieberman has pointed out, over five decades Biden has somehow managed to position himself wherever the centre of the Democratic Party happens to have been…
It’s fair to say that there has always been a dimension to Biden that places him in the FDR Democratic Party tradition—minus the visceral anti Semitism—and its version of top down statist governance in the sense of lots of spending and lots of programs, (most fully seen in the presidency of LBJ). But a few points here:
1, There’s no mention at all of the darkest of dark Brandon, which is him being knit into Biden Inc., involving his son and and his brother, his enriching himself thereby and lying about it.
2, His seeing America making the world a better geopolitical place is a crock, when measured by his foreign policy when in office and his support for and then continuation of Obama’s misbegotten foreign policy view that wanted to bring Iran into the community of nations and Obama blanching at crossing the red line he himself drew in Syria regarding Assad’s use of poison gas and Obama’s pissing on Israel. As Robert Gates said, Biden’s been in the wrong on every foreign policy recommendation or decision whether in the Senate or the Executive.
3, Biden as president hasn’t located himself at the centre of the Democratic Party. He hasn’t gone all the way left as in lining up with the Squad. But he’s gone far enough so as to be captured by the sensibility of progressivism that was manifest in his DEI policies. In fairness to Smith’s point, this aberrant progressivism might in fact be the Democratic Party centre, which then speaks poorly of it and Biden and should be noted and not elided as Smith does.
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4, Yet despite the billions of US taxpayers’ dollars that have been poured in, the Ukraine war is so far proving to be a strategic win for Putin, who has strengthened ties with China and India and is wielding ever greater influence in the rest of Europe.
Here I simply have to ask if Smith is right that Putin is gaining, has gained, a geopolitical strategic win from Ukraine? I have no clear view of that.
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5, It is true that he had never unequivocally pledged to be a one-term president but he had certainly implied it.
See my comment under 3, and it’s my impression that he more than implied he’d be a one termer but didn’t put up a neon sign as to that. But the main point I made in 3, remains regardless.
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6, His first big decision as presumptive Democratic nominee in 2020 had been to select Kamala Harris as his running mate, but he never behaved as if he truly trusted her to take over from him.
Yet it was a tragic failure of collective leadership that no one of importance in the Democratic Party had the bravery to oppose this hubristic decision, leaving Biden to win the primaries with no proper opposition.
Vice-President Harris and Governor Tim Walz probably ran about as good a campaign as they could have done, but could not climb out of the electoral hole they had inherited.
In contrast, 2024 was an election where the Democrats faced a huge uphill struggle, yet they came less than two percentage points behind the winner.
His “first big decision”, choosing Harris, was, as I’ve said, DEI inflected and that apart it was terrible. She was an incompetent VP and an incompetent presidential candidate. Smith makes no mention of that.
Not only was it a failure of leadership to let Biden run again without opposition, the Democratic machine was dastardly in shutting RFK down by throwing every legal obstacle it could against him opposing Biden. RFK seems a dangerous nut but that’s beside this point. The machine’s energies were spent protecting Biden from any challenge even though its principals knew he was impaired.
One of the giveaways of Smith’s bias, apart from his whitewashing dark Brandon, is his take on the Harris Walz candidacy. He says they did as well they could all things considered. But in fact they were, in a word, execrable. They came out of her nomination with a huge bump in numbers and money. And they had the luxury of an opponent, Trump, whose warts glisten. She won her one debate with Trump who’s simply not good at them. And then they blew it and two billion and half later wound up twenty million in debt with their hands even now out for more money. She was terrible. Walz was terrible. Their handlers were terrible. The campaign was tactically and strategically terrible. Microcosm: Harris, “Don’t go into Rafah: I’ve studied the maps.” Obviously she studied nothing.
A corollary of this giveaway is Smith’s characterization of the loss. Granted it wasn’t deep, but it was wide. She lost all swing states, did worse than Biden did in 2020 in every single county and potentially has precipitated a Democratic Party implosion.
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7, Trump doesn’t want America to “lead the world” as Biden does; he sees international relations as entirely transactional.
After all, Biden has told us that Trump is a literal threat to American democracy.
Biden wanted “to lead the world” the way I want to vacation in Sudan. He hasn’t been capable of leading anything including himself to where he wants physically to go. So the White House foreign policy cabal, Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, doing the work and generating the policies are Obama types who seem to have no clue how the world works, as shown up by Bibi dealing with the multiple pronged forces arrayed against Israel as evident in that WSJ piece by Elliot Kaufman. “Two state solution”, “cease fire”, hold back materiel finally some given grudgingly is what we got from them.
Plus, it’s wrongheaded to say Trump’s foreign policy is merely transactional as if that were a bad thing, though trust Smith to leave that word sit there bathing in its worst connotations. Transactional means Trump puts America’s interests first and will be muscular in advancing them. What country doesn’t ideally do that? And if he were being purely transactional he wouldn’t be robustly supporting Israel. That support is rooted in both American self interest and what’s geopolitically moral—Israel—and evil—Islamic terrorism arrayed against her and America.
Biden and Harris dug their own political graves calling Trump “a literal threat to democracy”, a meme Smith believes. For all his many faults, Trump is not that. And the post election day Biden warmly greeted Trump in the White House put the lie to the really wanton fear mongering Trump, Harris, Walz and many Democrats engaged in.
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8, Last two paragraphs
The New York Times, of all places, published a scathing editorial on December 4, its sentiment hard to disagree with: “This was a significant misstep that could leave lasting damage. It will not only tarnish Mr Biden’s own record as a defender of democratic norms, it will also be greedily embraced as justification for Donald Trump’s further abuses of pardon power and broader attacks on the integrity of the justice system Mr Biden has now ‘normalised’ the abnormal.” At a stroke of his pen Biden has gifted Trump an everlasting alibi.
The light of Biden’s world is dying. It was a world in which the United States, however hypocritically and imperfectly, had the power and confidence to serve as an example of a pluralist liberal society bound by the rule of law, and in which the federal government felt its responsibility to the folks of places like Scranton. Biden was born precisely when that world was coming into being. He leaves office as it finally dies.
Biden wasn’t a defender of democratic norms. The New York Times has that backwards. He trashed those norms in his personal self dealing—dark Brandon, in his imposition of DEI in his personnel choices and in his policies, and in his administration’s racial and gender fetishism.
As well, another bias giveaway is Smith making too little of the absolute scandal of the Democrats’ cover up of Biden’s serious impairment, brazenly putting him forward and terrorizing those brave enough to point out his obvious decline.
Smith has the chutzpah to assume Trump’s “further abuses of pardon power and broader attacks on the integrity of the justice system” given what was done to Trump through his first term and between 2020 and now, the Russian hoax, the Mueller investigation, the drum beat of Trump’s illegitimacy and the lawfare of the last four years.
Finally, as to the light of Biden’s world dying: not so fast. By and large the Democratic Party has moved away from it, leaving its elected centrists and centrist supporters in the minority. Admittedly populism is a two sided coin, with its own light—consensus conferring legitimacy, and its own darkness—appeal to our worst instincts and acting on them politically. But insofar as Biden’s light is concern with working class Americans and dare I say, common sense, Trump and Vance have more to offer. It’s not something Smith can see or wants to see.
