Assessing Biden’s Presidency

As Biden’s presidency winds down, I have tried to collect my thoughts on his presidency, on what went right and (mostly) what went wrong, and why.  I want to confess up front that I do not follow “inside the White House” reporting very closely (I have not read any books on the Biden White House, or about Biden’s career), so my views are mostly based on my inferences rather than on any direct reporting. 

My view is that on many issues Biden was complacent, reluctant to lead, and captive to conventional wisdom.  This led to potentially catastrophic policy and political failures.

Executive branch authority

I agree with Shikha Dalmia that Biden’s greatest failing as president was his inaction on “fireproofing the presidency”:

Given that it had been clear that the GOP, undeterred by the Jan. 6 insurrection, was very likely going to make Trump its nominee, Biden should have used his bully pulpit day in and day out to elevate the salience of “democracy strengthening“—his words—and then doggedly worked with Congress to build bulwarks against executive abuse. If he was looking for a legislative blueprint, he could have consulted Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith’s and New York University’s Bob Bauer’s 2020 After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.The bipartisan duo (Goldsmith worked in the Bush administration and Bauer in Obama’s) offered a comprehensive but realistic agenda for systemic reforms to rebuild the guardrails against abuses of presidential powers. Their hope was that just as President Nixon’s Watergate scandal served as a national wake-up call that led to serious efforts to ensure greater executive accountability, something similar would happen after Trump’s far, far more serious abuses. For example, post-Nixon, Congress passed—and President Jimmy Carter signed—the Inspector General Act that created nonpartisan, independent watchdogs within various federal agencies to keep an eye on corruption, cronyism, and political abuses in their ministries. (Trump of course trashed all of that, firing inspectors general who dared to expose his incompetence and corruption.)

But Biden did not champion any such reform effort. Worse, he abused his executive authority while actively thwarting congressional initiatives to rein it in and restore the wildly out-of-whack balance of power between the two branches of government.

Under Biden’s leadership, the Democrats failed to strengthen conflict of interest laws, disclosure laws, or laws protecting the civil service.  And they failed to rein in the emergency powers Congress has granted to the President, even though experts had been warning for decades that these laws were the legal equivalent of a loaded handgun lying on a table in a community center for unsupervised teenagers.  Now we face the very real prospect of the National Guard or military being used domestically to uproot millions of peaceful immigrants, and possibly even to suppress domestic protest or interfere with the conduct of elections.  Unbridled executive discretion will also allow Trump to use his office to reward friends and punish enemies, a point that is well understood by the business “leaders” flocking to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to the president-elect.

According to Dalmia, Biden’s failure to address these issues was due in part to a desire to win re-election by getting things done using executive power, and partly due to conventional thinking:

The other reason is reflexive turf-protection and hanging on to the power of the office no matter how it was amassed and how much it departs from the balance-of-power that the Constitution envisioned. “The Biden administration did not see the hardening of institutions as a political priority and let the normal bureaucratic mentality expand executive authority by default,” laments Soren Dayton, Niskanen Center’s Director of Governance, who has closely followed the administration’s foot-dragging for the past four years in frustration.

In other words, Biden remained stuck in an old mindset of governing in which enacting his policy priorities rather than addressing the new threats to America’s liberal democracy was prized. Hence, he is leaving the country deeply vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. He warned that Trump was an existential danger, but he never took his own warning seriously and so couldn’t convince the voters to do so either.

Every country experiencing democratic backsliding can testify that their authoritarian leader was far more determined and dangerous in his or her second term. Biden had an opportunity to help America break that pattern and put some solid guardrails around the office of the executive. Unlike other countries facing similar threats, he would have been aided in his effort by America’s strong liberal democratic institutions built over 250 years, not an asset any other country in the world has. Alas, he squandered it.

Biden fell into a business-as-usual mindset and defended discretionary executive power against legislative efforts to control it.  This reflects either a catastrophic complacency and failure of vision (did he not take seriously the possibility that he or another Democrat might lose the 2024 election?  did he not understand that business as usual would leave the country highly vulnerable to Trump or another personalist demagogue?) or, if he did understand the threat of a Trump victory, his inaction suggests a stunning failure to exert leadership within the executive branch and Congress.

Other examples:  immigration, election reform, covid

Passivity, complacency, and conventional thinking led to a recurring pattern of policy failure during Biden’s presidency.  The Biden administration dithered on immigration policy for years, a failure of will or foresight which may have cost us the election.  Congressional Democrats allocated literally trillions of dollars to ameliorating the impacts of covid, but failed to allocate a few tens of billions to research better vaccines.  They allowed the production of test kits to be phased out prematurely.  They failed to end pandemic restrictions following the introduction of vaccines and Paxlovid, despite the fact that the public was clearly ready for a return to normalcy.  Following January 6, congressional democrats continued to prioritize their old voting rights bills, which in reality were only messaging bills with no chance of passage, and they nearly failed to amend the Electoral Count Act. 

Ukraine

Biden’s initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was well within the range of reasonable policies.  But his failure to give the Ukrainians the support they needed to inflict greater military and economic pain on the Russians will likely lead to a humanitarian and political debacle. 

I can understand Biden’s original impulse to avoid escalation; I shared it.  But it quickly became evident that Putin was reluctant to escalate, and it should have become clear to Biden that allowing Putin to prevail was an invitation to further destabilization by Russia and perhaps even China.

Communication

It seems clear that early in his presidency either Biden or his senior staff decided that he should not defend his policies in public due to his lifelong proclivity to go off-script and blunder, perhaps exacerbated by his advancing age.  The complacency involved in this decision to cede the fight for public opinion to Trump and the Republicans is extraordinary. 

His communication failures extend to efforts to pro-actively shift blame to Republicans for anticipated problems.  An obvious case is immigration, where Biden could have insisted that a lasting solution would require Congressional action.  He could have offered to work with Republicans on needed reforms.  Of course, this would very likely have come to nothing, but it would have helped Democrats shift blame for an unpopular status quo to Republicans.  By the time Biden endorsed a bipartisan deal on immigration, the Democrats had lost the trust of the American people on this critical issue.

Last week Biden acknowledged that he should have signed the covid support checks that were sent out during his presidency.  This concession vastly understates how widespread and serious Biden’s failure to communicate was – failure to sign checks was hardly likely to swing many votes in 2022 or 2024 – but Biden’s obtuseness is understandable.  If he had acknowledged that communication is critical and that he was incapable of making the case for his policies to the American people, then the case for stepping down after one term would have been greatly strengthened.

Being president is hard

It is possible that I am being excessively critical of Biden.  To state the obvious, I’m mad at him.  But presidenting is an impossibly difficult job; perhaps Biden did as well as any replacement-level Democrat could have been expected to do. 

Even if this is true, it is important to be clear about where Biden fell short, to help avoid the same errors in the future.  As I have suggested, many of the failures noted above implicate congressional Democrats who are still in office as well as the outgoing administration.  Even at this late moment there may be opportunities to strengthen critical guardrails against Trump.  Let’s hope the Democrats seize these opportunities when they arise.