Do You Feel Sorry For Biden? Hell No!

photorandy2023

1 year ago

I have written several articles on our Presidential candidate Biden and President Biden. A list of the links have been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on Biden’s presidency.

Presidential farewell addresses aren’t typically the occasion for regrets, and accordingly, Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech this past week was a more traditional mix of boasts over accomplishments and warnings about the crowd moving into the White House on Monday. But reports persist that the 46th president remains convinced he should have stayed in the 2024 presidential contest, because he would have won. (This has reportedly caused outgoing Vice-President Kamala Harris “deep sadness.”) It’s rather jarring to realize that Biden deeply regrets the most important decision of his presidency, one that many Democrats and objective observers alike believe was only mistaken because it came too late.

So as we anticipate what could be the immensely consequential presidency of Donald Trump, we should close the books on this particular question. There’s never any way to prove counterfactuals, but we do have some pretty solid data rebutting Biden’s apparent belief that his self-defenestration saved Trump from defeat.

As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, a YouGov survey taken the weekend before the election showed a huge difference between the Harris-Trump contest reaching its end and a Biden-Trump race that might have been. Harris’s relative performance was ten points better than Biden’s. This is not a small gap; it suggests that if Biden had been the Democratic nominee, Trump would have truly won a landslide instead of imagining one, as he did after the actual election.

You don’t have to rely on this one poll, of course. When he dropped out, Biden trailed Trump by 3.2 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling averages and had trailed him for a month. Almost immediately, Harris led Trump in the same averages and never trailed. Everything we know about Trump’s final, crucial surge of support indicates a negative referendum on Joe Biden’s record in office and a positive reassessment of what Trump might offer, rather than anything Kamala Harris was or was not doing. It’s quite clear in retrospect that the brief “refresh” Harris provided in Democratic prospects was eventually overcome by the burden of the Biden administration’s many problems. The hypothetical Biden campaign that stayed in the race until the bitter end would have not only borne the same burden of incumbency, but the additional handicap after the disastrous June 21 debate of constant scrutiny of the Democratic nominee for signs of cognitive decline or disability. It was a debacle in the making.

The extreme improbability of a Biden comeback, had he tried to mount one, is even more decisively reinforced by measurements of his popularity as the general election approached. His job-approval rating had been higher than Harris’s throughout their administration — until she replaced him on the 2024 ticket. In August, her approval rating eclipsed his, and by Election Day (again, per FiveThirtyEight), Harris was at 44.3 percent, while Biden was at 38.5 percent. In terms of personal favorability, Bump shows how poorly Biden was doing by the time voters voted:

Once Biden stepped aside and Harris became the nominee, her favorability surged.

Between that point and Election Day, Harris’s net favorability was higher across demographic groups. Overall, her net favorability was an average of nine points higher than Biden’s. It was an average of 16 points higher with Hispanics, 11 points with women, eight points with men and even 11 points higher with Americans who didn’t attend college — a group to which Biden’s blue-collar bona fides were supposed to hold particular appeal.

Needless to say, Democrats lost the White House in no small part because of their weaknesses among several of these demographic categories where Biden’s standing was particularly bad. You didn’t have to be riveted to campaign coverage to grasp that every single thing that boosted the Democratic Party’s odds of beating Trump — the radical turnaround in fundraising, the huge boost in volunteers, the successful national convention, and, indeed, the widespread expectation that Harris had a good chance to win — flowed from Biden’s courageous but correct decision to withdraw his candidacy and designate her as his successor.

Of all the regrets Joe Biden may take with him as he leaves the White House for good, he should relieve himself of a bad conscience for accepting the consensus of Democrats that he “step aside” last summer. He did the right thing. He wouldn’t have won. He may yet derive the grim satisfaction of seeing the American people conclude that they, not Joe Biden, made the crucial mistake of 2024.

I feel sorry for Joe Biden (Letters to the Editor)

I feel sorry for Joe Biden. It is my impression he was in better shape back when he made his decision to begin his primary campaign for president than he is now.

Maybe back then I, along with many others, could talk myself into believing that he just might be capable of handling the physical and mental rigors of the most demanding job in the U.S.

I even chuckled over some of his early verbal goofs by passing them off as his being nervous or trying too hard to get his thoughts expressed in the heart of a moment.

But as they continued, they became harder and harder for me to rationalize or to accept. I began to wonder why others, especially his close friends and members of his family, were not influencing him to gracefully withdraw from the political arena.

To me that would have been a sincere act of kindness toward a man who has already given many, many years to public services.

By now, there have been enough instances of mental fumbles that have occurred to convince me that I would not want a person like the one I see now to be my brain surgeon. I would not want a person in a similar condition to be my airline pilot. Not my legal counsel. Not my financial advisor. Not even my grandchildren’s school bus driver.

Some have argued that everything would still be OK with Joe as president because there would others around him who would be there to help him make a decision. I would ask who are these people?

Who gets to pick them? Are we just to accept their views without hearing their philosophies, their views on issues, or giving us a chance to see if we support their values and they ours?

I thought the general idea of running the primary and general election process was so we can directly choose from among those persons that personally plan to help direct our entire country and represent it to the rest of the world.

Not to be forced to accept some second stringer from the shadows we had no voice in choosing.

I have witnessed situations where an individual in a deteriorating mental condition had sadly become adamantly convinced that the “conclusion” they reached in their mind was absolutely the right one and they could not be convinced otherwise by the best of intentions or efforts by others.

Then someone had to be right alongside to physically prevent a potentially bad outcome.

Joe’s recent interview where he said that he intends to serve out his full four year term and “absolutely” is planning for a second term raises a big alarm in my mind that maybe he has already reached or passed that threshold.

I am Joe’s age and I face some of the same declining physical and mental challenges that he appears to. Both Joe and I can be virtually assured that our capabilities will decrease over time, however neither of us has a clue regarding the rate of such decline and no treatment is presently medically available to change it.

Likely we both are and will continue to be the least qualified to judge our personal abilities at any given time. And those who are younger than us and blessedly unfamiliar with this part of the aging process,

I say for certain that in my present state I would not seek even the responsibility to drive the school bus Joe’s, or anyone else’s children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren ride on. It would be ridiculous for me to rationally conclude I could do it for the next four years even if, in my opinion, my symptoms of decline are less obvious than his at the present time.

Finally, I certainly don’t want either of us having the responsibility for the briefcase containing the nuclear missile launch codes with the potential to bring on the LAST world war.

The reason for my pity is for Joe Biden because he “thinks” he can handle that responsibility and more, and for others he has apparently convinced he should be trusted too.

I am not one of them for the above reasons and others. We all need to choose thoughtfully before voting in the coming election.

Trump calls Biden ‘bad guy’: ‘Don’t feel badly for him’

Former President Trump said that people should not feel bad for President Biden as he navigates the backlash from last month’s debate.

“And, you know, somebody told me, ‘I feel sorry for him because at that debate, he was so pathetic.’ They said, ‘I feel sorry for him.’ I said, ‘Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s a bad guy. He’s [an] absolutely bad guy and he’s destroyed this country. He’s absolutely destroyed this country.’ So I said, ‘Don’t feel badly for him,’” Trump said on Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show.”

Biden has been under fire in recent weeks after a stumbling debate performance left some Democrats wondering if he is up to running for a second term. A handful of Democrats have called on him to withdraw from the race and allow someone else to step up to the plate.

Biden has reiterated that he is not exiting the race as many of his allies and Democratic leaders have rallied behind him in recent days. He has argued that he remains the best candidate to defeat the former president in November.

During a rally on Tuesday, Trump challenged Biden to another debate and to an 18-hole round of golf. In response to the challenge, the Biden campaign said the president “doesn’t have time for Donald Trump’s weird antics.”

When asked Wednesday if the choice of his running mate would be influenced if Biden is replaced by another candidate, Trump said it would not be impacted. He also said that he does not care whether he is running against Biden or a different Democrat.

“No, I don’t care if it’s him or somebody else. It’s also policy. It’s more about policy than anything else. And these radical Democrats — they’re all radical, everyone that they’re talking about is a radical left lunatic,” he said.

“And whether it’s Biden or whether it’s somebody else, I think it’s the same. They want open borders, they want all the things we just discussed and much more,” he added.

An Important Question: “Do you feel sorry for President Biden?”

We had planned a trip to north Georgia to put our boat in on the waterway called Lake Allatoona, a Tennessee Valley Authority project of building dams to create power (as well as supplying jobs) around the time after the great depression. The trip north and our time out on the lake was great (and I was planning this story time to expound on the subject), but an incidental conversation with a relative about our President took precedence!

Once we were done with boating, we all had dinner and settled in for the evening to have a little wine and a lot of conversation. It was hardly any time at all until the subject of politics came up. As we were speaking of the current “installed resident” of the White House (President Joe Biden) and of all the gaffes he had made during the now historic Presidential debate, the subject of Mr. Biden’s “situation” took a different (and unexpected) turn. My brother-in-law “George” asked me, “As a Christian American, did you feel sorry for what “Joe” is going through?”

I thought that my answer was both quick AND decisive, and told him just how I felt about the life and times of “the Prez.” How George countered my answer caught me off guard, but it was not long before his state of mind was illuminated. Now, George is a Conservative Republican American, and his sentiments regarding what the “Dems” are doing to our great nation (through their “puppet president”) nearly made him (George) sick to his stomach. The reasoning for his query (concerning “J.R.B.” stemmed from a previous traumatic time in his (and our) lives. You see, Carolyn (his devoted wife of 61 years) was struck with the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease. “A neurological disorder, and the most common type of dementia” (as per the Google inquiry). The rest of us loved ones watched her mental and physical decline, but George was right there watching it happen to his “other half” (and best friend for over 61 years)!

So, I had to put my “other glasses on” to try to see his point of view. My initial answer to him regarding feeling sorry for him (or anything else, for that matter) was one of “He made his bed, now he (J.R.B.) must sleep in it.”

My secondary reply was, “Karma is real, and Joe is getting his share of Karma payback!”
Now, it may be true that President Biden has this type of medical issue. The hurtful part of this story (through my eyes) is that those powerful people who put him at his “station” are not going to let him go “quietly into the night.” They are going to squeeze every bit of under-the-table political postulating that they feel they paid for (and that includes the millions “loaned” to his family by China)! As the saying goes in politics, “There is no such a thing as a free ride!” This is not the first time that “people of power” have been forced to stay in the game longer than they can handle (or control) themselves. This same thing happened to Diane Feinstein near the end of her life.

Since Biden’s absolute disaster (with regard to the big debate between him and former President Donald Trump), it was like a major bomb going off on the Democrat’s side of the political “war games.” Most knowledgeable Americans will tell you that Joe Biden’s chances of re-taking the presidential elections are slim (if not totally non-existent). So, this must now be stated: the Democrats are NOT going to give up their position of power without a “no holds barred” fight! (Here comes more of my opinion). It seemed very advantageous that as the 2020 election time drew near, that COVID – 19 came upon us all, causing the nation (and the world) to be shut down, and with that, the voter ballot boxes were set out (unchecked) in “blue” cities, for gathering “supposed” official votes! The movie “2,000 Mules” (showing the “harvesting” of voters’ ballots) showed the corrupt measures taken to boost Mr. Biden’s count! As much as I want to see former President Trump win the election for the 47th President of these United States of America, I genuinely fear for his (and his family’s) lives!

In 2016, the votes couldn’t stop him, and all the impeachment and “lawfare ” tactics didn’t scare him off either. The Democrats are aware that if he (D.J.T.) wins the 2024 election, and if by chance the voting public (or God’s PROVIDENCE) allows both the House of Representatives and the Senate to get a republican majority, there will be hell to pay, and Guantanamo jail cells to aptly stay! (And that is all that I have to say)! Y’all have a blessed week!

It wasn’t all Biden

We were looking for someone to blame and many of us could not take the constant harping on Netanyahu. We should have looked at ourselves. Op-ed.

I have always tried to instill in my children the lesson that when you’re wrong, you should be a big enough person to admit your mistakes and apologize. I want to be a good example and therefore I am doing something that I never thought that I would do.

I would like to apologize to former US President Joe Biden, although I am not going to let myself be carried away. In any case, Mr. Biden, I’m sorry.

I erroneously supposed that because you ran your own country under dual principles of sleaze and incompetence you were also responsible for the corruption and ineptitude in our country. Because you and your administration were openly hostile towards the Jewish state, blatantly and repeatedly trying to undermine it and bring it down, I assumed that you were the main source of our troubles.

But you’re gone from the White House now. Packed away to whatever retirement home the Democrats choose to stick you in. Your days are being spent forgetting the names of world leaders in calm and tranquility.

Meanwhile, your replacement came in. So far, besides being able to stay awake, he’s proven himself different from you in other ways as well. For one thing, he has thus far shown himself to be a stalwart supporter of Israel. When he came to power, the entire dynamic between the two countries changed.

Early on, Trump grew angry that Hamas had violated the terms of the hostage exchange and effectively canceled the ceasefire deal, stating “As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock – I think it’s an appropriate time – I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break loose.”

When pressed he doubled down on his demand maintaining “I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday, and if they’re not returned – all of them, not in drips and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two. Saturday at 12 o’clock, and after that, I would say, all hell is going to break out.”

Unfortunately, he gave Israel the final say over the decision remarking that “I’m speaking for myself. Israel can override it, but from myself, Saturday at 12 o’clock, and if they’re not – they’re not here, all hell is going to break out.”

Surely with such support, Israel would take quick and decisive action. This was an unheard-of opportunity, a completely unasked-for changing of the rules in Israel’s favor. The government would be fools not to take advantage of this unprecedented opening.

Then the 12 0’clock deadline came and went without all the hostages being returned. And all hell, or even any hell at all, did not in fact break out. Despite not only having the green light, but actual encouragement of the United States, Israel chose not to do anything.

The idea that anything at all should be done to save the hostages and the insane idea that the terrible agreements discussed during Biden’s term and continued by Witkoff, had to be kept, prevailed. Like whipped animals, the government kept to the very letter of the agreement, releasing killers and allowing unchecked supplies to flow freely into Gaza. Each time Hamas committed a new outrage, some new unthinkable horror, the government of Israel simply condemned it and kept to the course.

But if our leadership did not press the issue, it soon became clear that President Trump would not drop the subject. He seemed genuinely and deeply moved each time a new batch was released with his commenting at one point “You just wonder about the condition of the hostages that they have. One group came in so bad, it looked like it was a concentration camp in Germany.”

It’s not just Trump. The entire US government seems to be on board. In a recent video, Secretary of State Mark Rubio reinforced America’s unwavering support: “You can always count on us – as long as I’m in the State Department and Trump is in the White House.”

And his VP, JD Vance shared “My message to the hostages – President Trump loves you and will not rest until all the hostages are released.”

Most recently, Adam Boehler, President Donald J. Trump’s Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, told CNN Hamas should release all the remaining hostages “or they are going to face total annihilation.”

Compared with the statements by some of our own leadership, or the straight-out silence from some quarters, it almost appears that the American government cares more about Israel’s welfare than we do.

It’s telling, or just a way to implicitly criticize Netanyahu, that the released hostages are not only thanking Trump for their deliverance, but begging him for help in releasing their fellow captives. It’s also true that Israel is afraid the hostages would be summarily murdered if they attack.

The hostages, however, and everyone else can see that with the US President, it’s not just talk. Trump and his team put their money where their mouths were. President Donald Trump’s administration recently announced that it had approved military sales to Israel worth some $7.4 billion. They also overturned a Biden-era export block on heavy weapons, allowing Israel to bring in 1,800 MK-84s, 2,000-pound bombs that can “pancake” buildings.

The American president not only gave us his blessings and encouragement to archive total victory, he gave us the tools we needed to do it.

And yet our government does nothing. The Knesset argues. Netanyahu makes strong speeches promising future reprisals. Meanwhile, aid flows into Gaza, Hamas keeps humiliating us on the national stage, and our soldiers put their lives at risk in an untenable situation.

After the horrors surrounding the return of the Bibas family, Trump allegedly told advisors he wants Gaza “wiped out” with no buildings left. He’s absolutely right. There is no reason for any part of Gaza today to be anything other than a smoldering pile of rubble.

A year ago, the opportunity we have been given would have seemed as unbelievable as a fairytale. The two-state solution is dead. We have US backing to relocate Palestinian Arabs. We have a world leader who is letting us call the shots. We’ve been given a chance beyond most Israeli’s wildest hopes. And still, we do nothing.

Clearly, the problem was not just you, Mr. Biden. Even with you gone and every opportunity before us, nothing has changed. Our upper echelons are corrupt and blame Netanyahu instead of Hamas for the situation, willing to concede everything as long as he is harmed, and our government faces the horrendous dilemma between saving hostages with a deal vs. desroying Hamas without mercy – knowing that much of the country has been persuaded that the hostage negotiations come first.

But – Every day that we do nothing, Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs grow in strength. Every delay gives them time to rearm and plan for the next time. The recently failed bus bombings prove that they are already hard at work. The blame for the next tragedy should fall squarely on the shoulders of the politicians who did nothing to prevent it.

Our prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “open the gates of hell” if all hostages in Gaza were not returned. So far, the gates have remained firmly closed.

Instead, we negotiate more one-sided exchanges that only highlight new depth of their depravity. We talk about moving on to phases that never should have been allowed to progress for so long in the first place. Some, albeit very few, even still dare to talk about ceasefires and coexistence.

To be fair, the PM cautioned that “We can’t always share the details of this strategy with the public, including when the gates of hell will be opened.” Perhaps the coming days and weeks will see him set up and take action. There is still time for him to come through and if he does well, I’ve already shown that I am a big enough person to apologize when I make a mistake and this time, I will be only too happy to be proven wrong.

Until then, the fact that Gaza hasn’t been retaken and its murderous inhabitants removed once and for all is a black mark on the Jewish state, an international embarrassment, and an internal source of disgrace.

And so, Mr. Biden I apologize for blaming only you. We, not you, appear to be a main cause of our own problems. Whatever wicked designs you once had on us seem unnecessary when you consider that the government of Israel is doing your job for you. There’s no need to look outside for the reason for our misfortunes. We needed to take a deep look within.

I don’t know if you are still aware enough to hear and understand this message Mr. Biden, but I pray that we are.

Writing the History of the Biden Presidency, in the Trump Era

A group of academics met to hash out a first scholarly history of the Biden administration. But in today’s scrambled politics, has the yardstick for success and failure changed?

Joe Biden left office with abysmal approval ratings — and faith that history would redeem him.

“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said in a farewell speech. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

In the meantime, there is the opinion of history professors — 17 of whom gathered last weekend at Princeton University to produce not a vindication, but something different: a first-cut scholarly evaluation of the Biden presidency.

Before the two-day gathering, the group had submitted essays on topics including immigration, foreign policy, the economy, media, political polarization and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. After revisions and editing, they will be published by Princeton University Press in about a year under the title “The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment.”

The group may have been looking backward, with a perspective often deep in the policy weeds. But there were plenty of nods at the chaotic first few weeks since the return of his bitter political antagonist, whose name seemed to come up almost as much as Mr. Biden’s.

“Donald Trump is the most consequential political figure of the 21st century, in the whole world,” Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown, who contributed an essay about the Biden administration and labor, said. “That’s both shocking, and something we’ve all gotten used to. In some ways, you could say Biden is a figure in the Trump era.”

The months since the election have brought bitter debate in Democratic circles about the failed Biden (then Harris) campaign. Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton and the event’s organizer, said the goal of the project was to rise above both Monday morning quarterbacking and old assumptions — including the idea that a two-term presidency is the norm.

The strength of Trumpism, he said, “changes the way we evaluate how Biden did what he did, and forces us to think about how to even measure political success and failures.”

The two-day discussion brought broad questions: How much do intentions, versus concrete, durable achievements, matter? How much do you view a policy record through the backlash it generated?

Also, amid shocking events like the Jan. 6 riot and Biden’s 11th-hour withdrawal from the race, how do you keep your partisan emotions out of it?

“Not surprisingly,” Kazin said wryly, “people mix their opinion of what they think should have happened with what really did happen.”

In November 2016, a group met to prepare a similar volume on the Obama presidency (following one dedicated to George W. Bush). That meeting took place a few days after Election Day, which had left the liberal-leaning group in state of shock at Trump’s victory, and some members wondering if they needed to revise their analysis of the previous eight years.

A gathering in March 2021 to evaluate the Trump presidency took place on Zoom, because of the pandemic, and included lots of questions about whether the Trump years were an aberration, or the beginning of a durable realignment.

Mr. Trump, it turned out, had opinions on the matter. After an article about the gathering appeared in this newspaper, an aide contacted Mr. Zelizer, saying the former president wanted to tell his side of the story.

The group met for an hour by videoconference with Mr. Trump that July (by coincidence, the day after a C-SPAN poll of historians deemed him the fourth-worst president in history). He ran through a list of “tremendous” successes on the economy, foreign policy and other areas, and was very much “in character,” Mr. Zelizer said, down to his prediction that the book would be “a No. 1 best seller.” (It was not.)

“I had the impression he was speaking in a way he thought historians would want to hear,” Mr. Zelizer said. “But the substance was very much the same.”

At last weekend’s gathering, there were warnings against seeing the Biden presidency as a failure, simply because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election and had begun dismantling his policies. Essays on subjects like environmental policy, the economy and race argued that Biden accomplished more than was often noted in the news media — or advertised by the administration itself.

“It’s easy to see it as a story of continually falling short,” said Joel Goldstein, a historian of the vice presidency at St. Louis University, who contributed a chapter about Kamala Harris. “But then you realize there was so much happening.”

There was plenty of talk of big-picture patterns. Was the Biden presidency the end of the federal civil rights era inaugurated by Lyndon B. Johnson? The last gasp of New Deal liberalism (or Clintonian neoliberalism)? An anomaly akin to the one-term Carter (or Van Buren) administration?

At the end of the first day, a group of four political scientists came as guests, armed with charts and graphs, along with some not-great news for Mr. Biden: Presidents who leave office with approval ratings below 50 percent (Mr. Biden departed at 40 percent) struggle to control how their place in history is understood.

They also raised the ways the Biden presidency — including in his approach to executive power, and his use of pardons — may have been more continuous with Trump than his champions want to acknowledge.

In his chapter for the book, about the Supreme Court, John Witt, a historian at Yale, made a similarly cheeky argument, suggesting that Mr. Biden used the court both as an antagonist and an “enabler.”

The court’s 2023 rulings outlawing affirmative action in college admissions and blocking Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan may have been defeats for the Biden agenda. But they also had a “silver lining,” Mr. Witt said, in taking an issue that split the Democratic coalition off the table.

“I think it’s a pattern across all 20th-century presidents, and also Lincoln,” he said. “They found a way to navigate the court and use it to offload political costs.”

As for abortion, the political costs of overturning Roe v. Wade may not have fallen on Trump, as Democrats had hoped. But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who contributed a paper on reproductive rights, said that did not mean that the right had won the bigger fight.

“Social conservatives are acting like they have a mandate I don’t think they have,” she said.

In an essay on race, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies and public affairs at Princeton, offered a full-throated defense of Biden’s record as “the first equity president.”

Biden, he wrote, “staked his entire presidency on battling white supremacy and delivering justice to every American left behind,” spending significant political capital and billions of dollars on initiatives woven through 90 federal agencies.

They may have all been “outlawed” by Mr. Trump, he said. But in the history books, Mr. Muhammad noted, a president’s record on race is usually defined by ideals and intentions. If backlash were the sole measure of a legacy, “there would have been little to admire in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.”

In the last hour of the gathering, discussion turned to the most shocking event of Mr. Biden’s presidency: his disastrous debate against Mr. Trump, followed by his decision to drop out of the race.

Here, things took a sharp turn to what Mr. Muhammad called “the land of speculation.” Who in the party knew what about Mr. Biden’s apparent cognitive decline, and when did they know it? Who in his inner circle was crucial to his decision to stay in it as long as he did?

Timothy Naftali, a research scholar at Columbia who wrote the essay on the resignation, wasn’t the only participant to drop the historian’s objectivity and confess to feeling emotional after the debate.

“I tried not to get into the issue of whether he was actually running the government, but I wanted to explain to myself why I felt so angry, instead of sad,” Mr. Naftali said.

“I wouldn’t say it was a Nixon-level cover-up,” he added, referring to Mr. Biden’s decline. “But there was concealment.”

Today, Mr. Biden’s withdrawal remains a raw topic for many. But by the time insider accounts and other sources that shed more light become available, Mr. Zelizer said, it may lose its emotional charge.

That partly depends, he said, on whether Mr. Trump’s return to office ends up being just another turn of American politics, or a blow to the democratic system itself.

“The promise of Biden, for his supporters, was to get rid of the element of politics that Trump represented,” Mr. Zelizer said. “Not only did he not do that, but it’s not a successor to Trump that wins the election — it’s Trump.”

As term nears its end, Biden presidency viewed less favorably by Americans than Trump or Obama, AP-NORC poll finds

As Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Americans have a dimmer view of his presidency than they did at the end of Donald Trump’s first term or Barack Obama’s second, a new poll finds.

Around one-quarter of U.S. adults said Biden was a “good” or “great” president, with less than 1 in 10 saying he was “great,” according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

It’s a stark illustration of how tarnished Biden’s legacy has become, with many members of his own party seeing his Democratic presidency as merely mediocre. About one-third described Trump as “good” or “great” on the eve of the Republican’s departure from the White House in 2021, according to AP-NORC polling, including about 2 in 10 who said he was “great” — even after he helped sparked a deadly insurrection that saw a mob of his supporters overrun the U.S. Capitol. Americans were similarly likely to describe both Biden and Trump as “poor” or “terrible” — about half said this characterized each president’s time in office — but about 3 in 10 said Biden was “average,” while less than 2 in 10 said this about Trump.

Biden’s standing is also much lower than the last outgoing Democratic president, Obama, who left office with about half of Americans describing his tenure as “good” or “great,” according to another AP-NORC poll.

Those findings are consistent with data released this week by Gallup, which found Biden’s standing similar to that of President Richard Nixon after the Republican resigned during the Watergate scandal. The Gallup analysis found that other presidents who left with poor ratings — including Trump, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter — saw views of their presidencies grow warmer with time. But for now, few seem impressed with Biden’s time in office, including a sizable chunk of Democrats.

“I’m not going to sound like ‘Star Wars,’ that he went over to the dark side and everything that might be implied there,” John Cressey, a 79-year-old Democrat who lives in the Los Angeles area and does background work for films and movies, said of Biden. “But I think he just lost the pulse of the nation and that’s why Trump won.”

Among supporters of Biden’s party, only about 1 in 10 described his presidency as “great,” while about 4 in 10 called it “good,” and a similar share described it as “average.”

Cressey said he saw the 82-year-old Biden declining physically and believes the president was increasingly controlled by aides. He says Biden let the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border deteriorate into “a mess.” And Cressey summed up his chagrin with Biden’s handling of the economy by saying, “Go buy a carton of eggs.”

Disappointment especially high among Black and Hispanic Americans

Things weren’t always so bad for Biden. About 6 in 10 Americans approved of the way he handled the presidency as he took office, according to AP-NORC polling, but by early 2022, that had fallen to about 4 in 10, where views largely stayed for the remainder of his term.

In the new poll, disappointment was especially palpable among Black and Hispanic Americans, who have traditionally leaned Democratic but shifted in larger numbers toward Trump in 2024.

The contrast with Obama was especially striking among Black Americans. About 6 in 10 said Obama, the nation’s only Black president, had kept his promises at the end of his term, compared with around 3 in 10 who said the same for Biden. Similarly, about 7 in 10 Black Americans said they and their family were better off at the end of Obama’s presidency while only about a third said that about Biden.

“I feel as though the economy hasn’t progressed in a positive way since he’s been in office,” said Evonte Terrell, 30, a sales manager at a telecommunications company from Detroit who described himself as a “waning Democrat.”

Terrell, who is Black, said the party has become too focused on things like climate change and war while de-emphasizing rebuilding communities and helping the poor. He also bristled at Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter, saying that, “as a father, I would do the same” but “not everyone is going to have that capability.”

Younger people were particularly likely to have a negative view of Biden’s presidency. Only about 1 in 10 Americans under age 30 say he was a “good” or “great” president, compared with about 4 in 10 ages 60 or older. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans ages 18 to 29 say Biden was a “poor” or “terrible” president.

Terrell, facing student loan payments, also pointed to Biden’s efforts to ease educational debt that were struck down by the Supreme Court. He said that amounted to years of “just deferring” when “otherwise I could have been paying it off this entire time.”

A perception of failed promises

The Biden administration helped oversee the passage of more large-scale legislation than did Trump or Obama — including on public works, microchip production and health care and promoting green jobs. The president also signed the first major gun safety package in decades.

Still, only about 2 in 10 Americans said the president made good on his campaign trail pledges. About 4 in 10 said he tried but failed to keep his promises, and a similar share said he has not kept his promises.
Mark Jeanmougin, 47, who is from Cincinnati and works in cybersecurity, voted for Trump in 2016 but backed Biden in 2020 and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

He sees Biden as a good president who set the United States up for success on issues like climate change while delivering badly needed infrastructure funding. But, he said, Biden “definitely ran into some activist judges who were saying no to some of his policies.”

Jeanmougin said Biden helped improve the post-COVID-19 economy and rising inflation was an expected consequence.
“A hard landing, lots of unemployment, or a soft landing with inflation,” he said. “We knew that was what was going to happen. So the idea that so many of my fellow citizens were unaware or didn’t know is really hard.”

In all, about half of Democrats said Biden tried and failed to keep his campaign promises, while about 4 in 10 said he succeeded.

Few believe they are better off

For the most part, Americans don’t think Biden is leaving the country in a better position than when he took office four years ago — with a few exceptions.

On the issues of creating jobs and prescription drug costs, Americans were about as likely to say Biden had a positive impact as they were to say he’d had a negative impact. A similar share said he had no impact.

But many thought he’d done more harm than good in other key areas. At least half of Americans said Biden had a negative impact on the cost of living, immigration and the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians — compared with about 2 in 10 who said he had a positive impact in each of these arenas.

He was also perceived as having more of a negative impact than a positive one on Russia’s war with Ukraine, despite his administration pushing for billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv. The negative views toward Biden regarding Israel’s war against Hamas were particularly pronounced among younger voters, with slightly less than 1 in 10 Americans under age 30 saying he had a positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

About 4 in 10 Americans said they and their families are somewhat or much worse off than they were when Biden became president, while about one-quarter said they are much or somewhat better off.

Only about one-quarter said they and their families were worse off at the end of either Trump’s or Obama’s presidency.

Resources

nymag.com, “Sorry, President Biden, You Would Not Have Beaten Trump.” By Ed Kilgore; lockhaven.com, “I feel sorry for Joe Biden.” By Ernest Ebeling Bellefonte; thehill.com, “Trump calls Biden ‘bad guy’: ‘Don’t feel badly for him’.” By Lauren Sforza; hernandosun.com, “An Important Question: “Do you feel sorry for President Biden?” By Steven Goodwin; israelnationalnews.com, “It wasn’t all Biden.” By Ilan Goodman; nytimes.com, “Writing the History of the Biden Presidency, in the Trump Era.” By Jennifer Schuessler; pbs.org, “As term nears its end, Biden presidency viewed less favorably by Americans than Trump or Obama, AP-NORC poll finds.” By Will Weissert and Amelia Thomson-Deveaux;

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