Anatomy of a handoff: Joe Biden’s legacy and its future
A legacy can’t matter if you don’t pass it on … and if you don’t understand that its passage from one generation to the next may not be on your timetable.
In the weeks after the disastrous June 27 Atlanta debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, the Democratic Party found itself walking in wilderness, at nothing less than an existential crossroads, a stark, red pill-blue pill pivot point between past and future. The steps the party took away from that abyss in the four weeks since then were an exercise of a basic survivability some Democrats had started to doubt. The fear was that not only were Democrats unable to win, maybe they weren’t even capable of their own self-preservation.
What a difference four weeks makes. We’ve lived through the Democrats snatching possible victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat. It’s instructive to look at how that happened.
If the June 27 debate was the floor, the Democrats put high to middling hopes in Biden’s next unscripted public appearance, the news conference on July 11 in Washington, to get closer to the ceiling again. But reactions to that news conference — his first in eight months and one that some observers thought would be dispositive of his campaign’s future — were straight outta Rashomon: Everything you interpreted and carried with you as the outcome depended on a singular perspective of Biden that you already had. If you believed in Biden soldiering on before, you still believed and the boss looked pretty good. If you didn’t see a path forward for Biden before, you still didn’t and the president looked unfit, maybe even unwell.
There was no breakthrough and, consistent with the division that defines us now, no common ground. But standing still was not an option for Biden, it was a net negative. The news conference was a proxy for the state of the campaign, indicating an absence of forward momentum. Call it stasis. Call it meh.
Using baseball parlance, Biden’s July 11 performance was a stand-up double. Trouble is, Biden needed to hit triples to be in a position to have a chance to win. And in a short time frame, less than 120 days, he needed one every time he stepped to the plate. Not even Josh Gibson hit that well.
◊ ◊ ◊
Then it got worse. On July 12, Biden was guest of honor at a trainwreck of a virtual meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It was a fiasco of stage-managing and unintended consequences that, with the news conference the day before, was a one-two punch into the weekend that Team Biden didn’t need.
From NOTUS, a new Washington publication: “For starters, Biden showed up an hour late to the Zoom call, according to a source familiar with the meeting, and it didn’t get much better from there.
“Organizers of the Zoom meeting had said only two members were allowed to ask questions — Reps. Sylvia Garcia and Lou Correa — but Biden opened the floor up to more questions, the source familiar with the call told NOTUS. At least the president tried to open up the meeting to more questions.
“The source said the campaign tightly controlled who could ask a question on the call. Reps. Gabe Vasquez and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez both used the “raise hand” feature on the Zoom call, and both had their hands lowered by organizers of the call and were not allowed to speak, the source said. …”
◊ ◊ ◊
The collapses of July 11 and 12 were so bad partly because they reminded us of the debacle that came before. No one could have known about the COVID health crisis to come, on July 18, announced with Biden’s two-word tweet — “I’m sick.” Nothing could have been more illustrative, more symbolic of the Democratic campaign thus far.
It added up to a campaign trapped in its own shambolic narrative. We were approaching the Shakespearean: A wise, generally thoughtful, rational leader angrily fails to recognize his shortcomings, and can’t see the need to remove himself from governing for the good of his nation … and over time, his refusal to exit the precincts of power ensures the very outcome he’d hoped and worked to prevent.
The presidential election of 2024 was becoming a referendum on Joe Biden, instead of what it must properly be: a referendum on Donald Trump and his manifest unfitness to assume the United States presidency a second time. For that reason alone, Biden was compelled to prepare for the end of his bid for re-election, and the end of a storied political career.
◊ ◊ ◊
On July 21, a Sunday otherwise preoccupied with baseball, vacations and the heat that never seemed to end, the word arrived from Rehoboth Beach via social media: The president would not seek re-election. He was standing down, disobeying that natural inclination to tough it out, press on, finish what he started. After weeks of silence, after three and a half years of rolling rescue of the American economy, environment and self-image from the Trump administration, Biden decided he would in six months exit from the job of a lifetime and morph into the civilian he wants to be again, tinkering with the Camaro in the driveway, a modern-day Cincinnatus dozing on the Adirondack in the afternoons, a beer at his elbow and the thanks of a largely grateful nation at his back.
And as expected, Biden endorsed the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, to be his successor, both making history by naming her and positioning her to make more history on her own. The handoff was the crowning benevolence from a 52-year veteran of the machinery of Capitol Hill, proving Joe Biden knows how new blood invigorates the Democratic party — and how, despite his deepest combative instincts, he’s no longer equipped to be the source of that transfusion.
Biden knew that all the crying and fears about the logistics required to rally around some unknown challenger, all the teeth-gnashing about not being able to ramp up a campaign from zero, the reflex use of the lazy standard go-to (Don’t Change Horses in Mid-Stream) only reinforced a narrative of predictive failure. We were warned what not to do on the basis of a series of comfortable clichés. So that counter-narrative emerged, one that framed the idea of a new candidate in the paralyzing boogeyman context of a gamble or a risk — which is to say, a bigger gamble or a greater risk than the one posed by Biden staying in the race.
◊ ◊ ◊
But Biden also knows these are not conventional times. It’s precisely the willingness to move in another direction, to be the change we’re after, to embrace the unconventional within the party’s most familiar forms, that the nation was desperately seeking from the Democrats. Notwithstanding Biden’s ethical and political obligation to endorse Harris as his successor, that choice never really was an option. In Donald Trump, this country faces an adversary who is anything but conventional; the threat is not theoretical. The threat is real.
We’ve never been here before; for that reason and others, we can’t be held in thrall to the comfort zone of our political precedents. There is no precedent for where we are right now. The closest historical moment to these precipitous times, to the danger the republic faces, would have to be the runup to the Civil War. Thinking outside the box isn’t enough; denying the box exists may not be enough either.
Harris, obviously the first among equals for the nomination in August, ushers the party forward, and sends a signal of looking generationally forward, not behind, to address the challenges of the future. Now and for the next three+ months, we may hear rear-guard muttering from the incrementalist naysayers who can’t forgive Harris for having once been a, a prosecutor — the horror! — or those who can’t overlook certain elements of style, personality and a personal past. Everyone’s got somethin’, especially those irredeemably dim conservative mechanics hard at work yoking her joie de vivre to an imaginary intellectual deficit, as if a person can’t laugh out loud and think strategically at the same time.
Regardless, Harris satisfies the requirements of the moment; in this succession drama, Kamala Harris is serious people, and our comfort zones are, or damn well should be, irrelevant. Quiet as it’s kept in the furious fulminating, there’s recent polling from sound sources that shows Harris’ approval numbers ticking up. Bigly. Newsweek reported on July 22 that, in no fewer than three reputable polls conducted earlier in July before Biden stepped down, Harris led Trump in a hypothetical matchup, albeit with her leads in these surveys well within the margin of error.
But in a Fox News poll of voters between July 22 and 24, Harris led Trump in four of the states many think may decide the election — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. In Michigan, Harris’ favorability topped Trump’s by 10 points. The margin of error was three.
◊ ◊ ◊
Every administration leaves its place in (or its mark on) American political history. Joe Biden’s will as well. His legacy is cumulative; it didn’t begin with his time in the White House. Biden, who came to the Senate in 1972, spent years there before joining Barack Obama in an epochal White House victory in 2008. Eight years as vice president. The Biden legacy is built on those foundations of experience, leadership, dedication, and a fierce embrace of this country’s everyday people.
And more: Some central core of the legislation that Biden has advanced and enacted since 2021 — the essence of Democratic values made actionable and real — bears the DNA of every Democratic administration that preceded his own. That doesn’t vanish when he walks out the door for good.
Which makes sense. By definition, a legacy is something of value that’s communicable, transferable to a successor generation. Strictly speaking, a legacy has no meaning without its extension, if you don’t pass it on. And the time when it’s passed on may or may not be according to a game plan, or a campaign strategy. Sometimes you have to pass on a legacy sooner rather than later. Joe Biden finally understood that, in the fierce urgency of right now, while the transmission of his agenda, its policies and philosophy will be as planned, it need not have been as scheduled. The exigencies of this national moment, right now, made that both clear and necessary.
And that should have been par for the course for an American builder, or someone certainly in spiritual harmony with those who’ve helped build this iteration of the United States. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said on March 9, 2020, in Detroit, in the depths of the first campaign. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
What’s called for now is getting behind the first presumptive beneficiary of that endowment, and accepting that this bridge-building job — maybe the most valuable, consequential, necessary public-works project in the nation’s history — had to be finished well ahead of schedule.
