Never Forget How Many Times the Liberal Establishment Saved Biden’s Arse

Within minutes of its announcement, the official narrative of Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race was already being etched in stone by those who had spent the better part of a month pushing for it. “Joe Biden has been one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me,” said Barack Obama. “Today, we’ve also been reminded – again – that he’s a patriot of the highest order.” “An actual hero,” remarked New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “This is what America First looks like when it’s a lived ethos, rather than a mask for narcissism and ambition.” “God blessed America with Joe Biden’s greatness and goodness,” gushed Nancy Pelosi – a leading figure in the backroom soft coup that finally forced the president’s hand.

At this point, what can even be said? From the evening of his catastrophic June debate performance until the middle of last weekend, Biden and his fanatical inner circle were stubbornly determined to continue their doomed march to November: dismissing critics as “bedwetters”; waving away alarming poll numbers in battleground states; and insisting that a candidate unable to get through an interview or read from a teleprompter without slurring his words was somehow fit to wage an effective national campaign (let alone serve four more years in office). That this contemptible posture finally became untenable is less a testament to Joe Biden’s nobility than to party elites belatedly catching up to the preferences of their voters.

Even before Biden officially announced his intention to run for reelection, polls consistently suggested there was little appetite for his candidacy even among self-identified Democrats. By last September, the share of Democrat voters and Democrat-leaning independents wanting a different candidate was as high as two-thirds. Displaying stunning contempt for the electorate, neither Biden nor the Democratic establishment seemed to care. The DNC declared for Biden without a moment’s hesitation, holding no primary debates and doing its utmost to make 2024 a contest in name only (in several states rivals were kept off the ballot entirely; in Florida, the party simply refrained from holding a primary at all).

For their part, party elites and the president’s inner circle did their utmost to shield him from scrutiny and, where possible, hide him from public view altogether. Not since October 2021 has Biden taken questions from voters in a town hall. He’s given stunningly few press conferences and has been so allergic to questioning from the media that even the New York Times editorial board lamented the extent to which he had “actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists.” Had his team not pushed for an early debate against Donald Trump last month, it’s anyone’s guess how long the charade might have continued – or how serious its consequences might have been come election day.

That Biden’s undignified exit has elicited yet another round of paeans to his selflessness and nobility is in many ways a fitting coda to the career of a man repeatedly rescued by the very liberal establishment that has finally turned on him. A middleweight politician whose ravenous personal ambition has long dwarfed his intelligence or abilities, neither Biden’s compulsive dishonesty nor his litany of destructive stances has ever seemed to stop him from failing upward.

Liar, liar.

Arriving in Washington during the Nixon era as a sworn opponent of an important school desegregation program, Biden’s first campaign for the White House collapsed amid revelations he’d lied about his academic achievements; plagiarised a speech by then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock; and pulled from the ether an entirely fictitious story about his involvement in the civil rights movement. Exuding an impenetrable air of aw-shucks earnestness, the Antrak-riding senator from Delaware rarely let his everyman persona be an obstacle when corporate interests came calling and was a key booster of Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act – also known as the Crime bill – that institutionalised mass incarceration.

Boasting a shaky record on abortion rights and loudly championing the Bush administration’s criminal invasion of Iraq, his 2008 campaign for president seemed to confirm the impression that Biden was a man from a less liberal age whose moment had passed. Having described his then-rival Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”, Biden went on to win less than 1% in the Iowa caucuses and duly suspended his second campaign for the presidency. Invited onto the ticket after Obama’s hard-fought battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Biden spent the next eight years riding the coattails of a popular and charismatic president – only to be passed over as party elites cleared the field for Clinton to run again.

By 2020, Biden was visibly not his old self: prone to incoherent tangents and bizarre lapses in memory. In just ten days, he appeared unable to recall Obama’s name; confused Britain’s then-prime minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher; said Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated in the “late 70s” (rather than 1968); and mixed up the timeline of the 2018 Parkland school shootings.

What did remain was his habit of making things up: an arrest in apartheid South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela that had never taken place; a stint as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania that wasn’t real; an impeccably stylised tale about visiting Afghanistan to recognise the heroism of a Navy captain that never happened; a professed stand against the Iraq War that was the opposite of his actual position; involvement in the Civil Rights movement that he had previously admitted was non-existent.

Failing upwards.

Yet again, none of it mattered. Having done their utmost to find an alternative to the insurgent movement led by Bernie Sanders who wasn’t Biden, Democratic elites went all in on his flagging campaign and (aided by the sudden onset of a pandemic that badly compromised the remaining primaries) successfully staved off the Sanders threat. Thanks to lockdowns, Biden was spared much of the actual business of campaigning and defeated Trump in an election that saw him win record votes but was still far too close for comfort.

Notwithstanding the hyperbole from liberal commentators that greeted the first year of Biden’s presidency, his administration can boast some real domestic achievements. His government notably (if inconsistently) broke from previous Democratic administrations in its willingness to support organised labour. Against the wishes of a media that never really forgave him for it, he ended America’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

In the final estimation, however, it is not Afghanistan, the Inflation Reduction Act, standing on a picket line with striking autoworkers, nor the aftermath of a humiliating debate performance for which the Biden presidency deserves to be remembered. If liberal elites are today able to expound on Biden’s decency, it is only by ignoring his steadfast support for Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza – the final, repugnant gesture in a long career punctuated by the morally indefensible.

Heralded just a few short years ago as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt, the death rattle of Biden’s doomed campaign for reelection has left him an isolated, resentful, Nixonian figure: backed by a dwindling palace guard of diehard loyalists; abandoned by the very elites upon whom his career has depended; praised and celebrated despite everything he has said and done.