Normally it is best to assess political careers well after someone leaves office. But these aren’t normal times.
President Biden’s career has been long and enduring, but not without mistakes. When partisan feelings fade, his presidency will be judged as the highlight of his career. He has been a consequential American president.
Biden has held elected office for all but four of the last 54 years, serving on a city council, as U.S. senator, vice president, and, finally, president. No public servant gets it all right, and Joe Biden is no exception.
His early Senate years marked him as a centrist Democrat. For 16 of his first 20 years in the Senate, the GOP held the White House. So, most of his legislative efforts were to craft a compromise in budget bills, judicial nominees and regulatory expansion.
Two things distinguished Biden’s Senate career. The first is that he did the work to understand policy issues and craft legislation that would perform as intended. The second was that, in the process of compromise, he became a strong institutionalist. He focused on making congressional deliberation and oversight a practical part of governing.
The Senate today is filled with people who disdain the hard work of understanding a problem. They are instead fundraising and looking for another job. Biden took the job seriously and worked hard at it.
Easily the strongest critique of Biden as a senator is his poor judgments on foreign policy. He voted against authorization for use of force against Saddam Hussein’s aggression in 1991 — a war that was backed by the United Nations and fought by a coalition of more than 40 nations. Later that year, he pressed to have the U.S. unilaterally intervene in the Bosnian Civil War, which had no supporting alliance. Two years later, he opposed President Clinton’s planned intervention in Haiti to stop its civil war. Then, six years later, Biden supported our invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.
These positions are dizzying in their contradictions. It is for good reason that Robert Gates observed that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Biden’s public service was marred by two tragedies. First, in the days after being elected to the Senate, his wife and infant daughter were killed in an automobile accident. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were severely injured. Decades later, as vice president, Beau, a veteran of the Iraq war and attorney general of Delaware, died of brain cancer.
That tragedy convinced Biden to skip his third run for the presidency. His first attempt, in 1988, was derailed because one of his speeches appeared to copy those of Neil Kinnock, a British political leader. Those accusations seem quaint by today’s standards and lay bare the deep unburdening of concern for personal character that marks much of America’s troubled electorate.
It is difficult to judge Biden’s time as vice president, other than noting his skills as a long-serving senator likely helped President Obama’s legislative victory on the Affordable Care Act. It is Biden’s presidency that has set his place in American history.
Biden took the oath of office amid the worst global pandemic in a century, with 6.4% unemployment rate and a global recession. Two weeks earlier, his predecessor helped orchestrate a clumsy insurrection that was the first challenge to a peaceful transfer of power in almost 250 years of American democracy.
Only Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman ascended to office under such daunting conditions.
Almost immediately, Biden began work on legislation. His administration passed a second COVID relief bill. It was much smaller than the CARES Act passed during the Trump administration and, together, these bills pushed us out of the downturn much faster than any other developed nation. These bills also accelerated inflation, which began in earnest late in 2022, driving misperceptions of the overall performance of the economy.
Legislatively, the rest of the Biden administration has been the most successful term of the 21st century. On domestic policy, the George W. Bush administration was heavily hindered by foreign affairs. In eight years, Bush managed a tax cut, an education bill and a transportation bill. Both the Obama and Trump presidencies were largely confined to one piece of legislation each; tax cuts for Trump, and health care for Obama.
In contrast, Biden passed a large infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act, which is probably the only legislation that has on-shored any U.S. industry in history. Biden also came very close to a sweeping immigration bill, but, like Bush before him, was derailed by Republicans who preferred to campaign on failed policies rather than vote for a remedy.
Keeping his promise to end the war in Afghanistan, Biden ordered a poorly planned and executed withdrawal from a two-decade long war. That he implemented the Trump administration’s exit plan is no excuse. This was a mistake, though likely not of long-term consequence.
In contrast, Biden orchestrated the most important American foreign policy success since the collapse of the Soviet Union and maybe the second-most important since World War II. The invasion of Ukraine marked a critical turning point in his foreign policy success.
Rallying NATO, Biden rushed funds and materials to Ukraine to oppose a massive Russian invasion. Fighting outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine’s armed forces repelled the invasion, recapturing most of the lost territory within a few months. Today, Ukraine has defeated Russian offensive capacity and fought to a stalemate.
Biden’s efforts brought two formerly neutral nations—Sweden and Finland—into NATO. This was a spectacular foreign policy success, strengthening an alliance that has gone to war only once—in defense of the U.S. after 9/11. The president’s visit to Israel in the early days after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7 will also be remembered as a key, perhaps the key, message of support to our beleaguered ally.
Biden’s decision not to seek the nomination for a second term will be a footnote to his presidency. He will be better remembered for having overseen the strongest economic recovery from the COVID pandemic in the developed world, while passing important domestic policy bills. Most importantly, he will be credited for strengthening American national security against a well-organized, pro-Russian faction in Congress.
Unlike his predecessor, Biden rose to the challenge of his office, giving the American people a consequential presidency in challenging times.
Michael J. Hicks is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University. Send comments to [email protected].
