The Pride and Tragedy of Joe Biden
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I didn't need a break. I recorded episodes just for my family, monologues punctuated by attacks on my absent co-hosts. So it was a good Christmas season. Excellent. I weep for your children and suggest therapy. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Michelle Cottle. I'm Ross Douthat. I'm Carlos Lozada. And this is Matter of Opinion. We're back, baby. We're back.

Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's officially our first Moo episode of 2025. Needed the break. But I'm thrilled to have the band back together. And we're all back in your feeds. So, dear Moobsters, please make it a part of your New Year's resolution. Moobsters? Are we Mooskivites? Have we really agreed on Moobsters? Can I continue? Okay.

I want them to put us on their New Year's resolution list to tune in regularly because we have far too much to catch up on for this nonsense. It's already the second week of January. Everyone's given up on the resolutions already. It's over. The key is not to make resolutions. Then you never disappoint yourself. So in this case, we are a resolution, right? We're someone else's resolution to listen to us. OK, good. That's where we are. But I mean.

I need to know what I've missed. So top line from our time apart, guys, anything interesting from your households? Like in our lives? Well,

Well, yeah. I'm not going to divulge that. Ross wants to talk about how he's inflicting fake podcasts on his family. I don't do that. Carlos is spicy this morning. It's very cold. This is because there are snow days in Maryland. Cold like the snows of Greenland. Oh, okay. One thing you've missed, Michelle, is that the United States is becoming a colonial power again. It's awesome. Ross is very excited. Look at him. I can see him smiling. I just can't.

All right. Proceed, proceed, proceed. Okay. So we're going to have plenty of time to discuss Trump's magnificent future. But for today, I want us to talk about President Biden's legacy. He's got just about a week and change left in office. And more than that, he's ending a five-decade-long run in public service. So before he goes and the Trump moving vans roll down Pennsylvania Avenue, I want us to look at the whole of Biden's legacy and

including the 2024 election, but also going beyond it. How does it look now? And what might it look like down the road with more hindsight? So to kick this all off, I'm wondering if we can talk about this legacy outside of the 2024 election. Ross, you got a thought on this? Well, I think the answer is probably no, but let's say that the answer is yes for a

to argue for the Biden administration as an epic disaster, no matter what angle you take on it. I think I should try and sketch out a narrative in which Biden's reputation is moderately redeemed by history. So I think if you wanted to tell a story

Of Biden's redemption, you would argue first that his administration had a number of serious legislative accomplishments that sought the reindustrialization and rebuilding the technological production base in American life, the CHIPS Act.

most notably combined with big ticket efforts to basically push technological solutions to climate change. And so I think you can imagine spinning forward a story where over the next 20 or 25 years, climate change and competition with China both loom extremely large.

And people interested in rehabilitating Biden's reputation argue that he put America on a good track in both of those areas, did more in terms of infrastructure spending than Donald Trump ever did in his first term, and that this is a really important part of his legacy. And then I think you could combine that with an argument that even though the withdrawal from Afghanistan in its execution was disastrous, it

It was actually clearly the right thing to do, something that other presidents, Obama and Trump, had wanted to do and hadn't been able to do. Biden sort of yanked the Band-Aid off, and then you would attach to that a defense of how the Biden administration has handled the war in Ukraine. Anyway, I'll stop there. But that's an attempt to sort of run through –

A pro-Biden interpretation of what his administration accomplished, notwithstanding how it ended and other factors that we can get into, where I do have some negative views. Oh, those I'm sure we'll get into. Yeah, they'll come out. Just a few. Carlos? You know, you asked, is it possible to consider Biden's legacy without focusing on the 2024 election, right? And

the answer to that is is no right that it's not possible to assess the biden presidency without looking at his decision making during the campaign his decision to run for re-election even his delay in withdrawing from the race has had far-reaching consequences for for the party for the election for the country

But I think it is possible to assess and evaluate his presidency beyond that decision. It's our job to look at the totality of what a president has accomplished. And there was a Gallup poll published just this week asking how Biden will be judged by history, basically looking, asking Americans this question, right? And you could say he will be judged to be a poor, below average, average, above average, or outstanding president. And 54%

said that it would be either below average or poor, right? Like the two bottom categories. And about 45 picked average, above average, and outstanding. To me, that says that there were significant accomplishments overshadowed by some major failings, even apart from whatever happened in 2024. He helped the U.S. economy recover from COVID, set in motion some long-term transformations, which Ross alluded to, that could set the U.S. economy on a firmer footing.

but at the same time presided over debilitating inflation, due in part to some of those policies. He helped pull NATO together in opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine without getting us into a direct possible nuclear war with the Ruskies, and yet the world seemed to still kind of explode under his watch.

His progress on the border came far too late for it to matter politically or far too late to make a convincing case that it mattered to him more than politically. So even when you set aside 2024 and the campaign, you know, I think of this as at best a sort of partial credit legacy.

Yeah, I mean, that feels right. It feels like something that was deeply damaged. It started off with him pledging to do a little bipartisan work in the Senate. He liked the wheeling and dealing and the collegiality and clubbiness of it. And he felt like he had a good –

handle on how to deal with the legislative branch as the president. And sure enough, he came in and was a very productive president for the first couple of years. He may not have done everything everybody wanted him to do, but by God, he made infrastructure week a reality, you know, dug us out of COVID, climate change policy, the CHIPS Act, all of that you're talking about. But it was a little bit Shakespearean in that he had a kind of tragic, fatal flaw.

And that was his pride. He thought he was the only guy who could

beat Trump again and keep the nation on a certain track. And that wound up basically tanking his legacy, at least temporarily. But anyway, I think we glanced over your negative thoughts here. No, well, I think, again, trying to stick with the framework. When I look back over the things I myself wrote about Biden throughout his presidency,

Again, as someone who had plenty of fundamental disagreements with his administration, I do think that there were a bunch of moments where I found myself sort of understanding and defending moves the administration made that.

in the end, look unsuccessful in hindsight. So one key example would be with the war in Ukraine. I think that, you know, the Biden administration was correct to rush arms and support to the Ukrainians once it became clear that they could, in fact, stand up to the Russians with support. They were correct to support Ukraine's counteroffensive, the initial one that went quite well. And then there was this point where things

things were sort of going Ukraine's way and

I think in hindsight, that was actually clearly the moment when the administration should have made a big push for a negotiated settlement. But instead, the administration ended up supporting a further attempt at another Ukrainian counteroffensive to regain more territory. That counteroffensive stalled out, ultimately failed, gave Russia an advantage that it retains to this day that has made

the prospect of negotiated settlement worse for Ukraine than it would have been. I think that mistake looms large in terms of assessing Biden's foreign policy record and how he handled the Ukraine war. But I didn't write a column at that particular moment saying, you know, now is the time to negotiate, right? I was saying, well, you need to negotiate, but it's probably okay to give Ukraine another season of attempted counteroffensive. So that's an example where

In hindsight, there was a big missed opportunity by the Biden administration. But I'm not going to claim that I identified it. And wartime foreign policy is, in fact,

extremely difficult. Yeah, that's been one of the more interesting developments of the Biden administration for me, which is that a lot of what he has been most harshly criticized about has been his handling of foreign policy. And we're talking about a guy who this was his selling point, right? I mean, in the Senate, he was known for being a foreign policy expert. A lot of presidents come into the job with zero foreign policy.

Expert is a strong. I mean, there were lots of people who thought that Biden was terrible at foreign policy. Right. Yes. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he had been wrong about most issues. You can disagree with him anyway. But but yes, he had foreign policy experience. But this was for the general public, supposedly one of his selling points, not that the general public really.

gives a crap about foreign policy for the most part, unless we've got troops on the ground. But he was more experienced in this area than the vast majority of presidents. If we're on the foreign policy digression here, let me just say one thing about Afghanistan. The administration has gotten a lot of deserved grief over the Afghan withdrawal, how chaotic the whole thing was. But

I really think, to be fair, we have to acknowledge that the American screw-up in Afghanistan has many, many consequences.

fathers has widely shared responsibility. And it is unfair for it all to fall on the shoulders of the guy who finally pulled the plug. Yeah, but that's what you do as president. The execution matters and you take the hit if it doesn't go well. Yes. And that's always the easy way for people to be like, well, I agree with the, you know, the idea, but it's really the execution, right? It's like you can attach that to sort of like any policy outcome that you want to criticize, but not really criticize too harshly. The

The U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan was a decades-long undertaking, right? The U.S. abandoned Afghanistan after it stopped being a Cold War proxy fight against the Soviets. George W. Bush diverted resources from Afghanistan for his war of choice in Iraq. Administrations of both parties lied about the supposed progress that was being made, right? There's a very damning book called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post. It's all there. No one wanted to end the war because they all knew what a disaster it was.

it would be when they did so. And so when Biden ripped the Band-Aid off, as Ross said, the wound was always going to be festering and ugly. He still gets blamed for it. That's fine. That's how the world works. That's how presidents are assessed. But to suggest that the U.S. failings of Afghanistan are his alone is to ignore the entire war on terrorism. OK, but before we go down this particular rabbit hole too much, he had many other failures that

that the voters were more concerned about than just Afghanistan. And I think immigration was a huge one.

And then, of course, the economy is just complicated and we'd have to dig into that for six shows on its own. But right. I mean, I think people will be litigating the inflation debate for a long time. I think the immigration debate is a bit simpler. And it's an example of something that goes back really to Biden's campaign, where one of the odd things about Biden's campaign for the presidency was that he clearly won the Democratic nomination in.

as the more moderate alternative in a party that was otherwise swinging to the left. And then having won the nomination, he himself decided for the sake of party unity, because of the climate at the time, because there weren't a lot of Biden loyalists to staff an administration, he himself pivoted to the left in terms of personnel and policy on social issues especially. And

That was a big contributor to the moves his administration made on the border. And I think if I were telling a story about Biden's failures, I would say the promise of Biden was that he would be the kind of moderate elder statesman presiding over Biden.

and tempering the more progressive left-wing inclinations of his party. And instead, he didn't do that. He did not really ever triangulate against his own base. He never tried to be Bill Clinton or Joe Biden of the 1990s, especially on social issues, especially on immigration. And he

Again, I don't I don't think we can litigate why that was without getting into his age and decline. But I think that that is also a reasonable story to tell that the Joe Biden of 1997 or even 2007, I think, would have done a better job of, you know, saying to his party's activists, OK, we're not doing everything you want on the border because it's going to blow up in our face. And the Joe Biden of 2020 did not do that.

I think that could be said of the whole Democratic Party that has shifted that direction, right? And he was kind of following the party. I mean, the Senate's approach to this not that many years ago among the Democrats would never have flown in recent years. It's just like the whole party's moved that direction or did. Right. But if you have that kind of dynamic in your party, in theory, putting someone with a long record of self-conscious moderation and

and a memory of the days when Democrats struggled because of social issues, having him in charge should have been helpful. I mean, I wrote a

You know, when the Times asked people to write endorsements for Democratic candidates in the 2020 primary, and I ended up writing the pro-Joe Biden piece. But that was part of my thinking, that it would make sense for the Democrats to have as their standard bearer someone who remembered the days before Trump.

the progressive base took over. But you just didn't see that from Biden in office. Yeah, I mean, part of what's interesting to me about both the immigration process

and the inflation debates is just how Biden and the Democrats spoke to the public about this. This week, USA Today had a long sort of legacy interview with Joe Biden that Susan Page conducted. And he said that his biggest regret was that he didn't effectively counter Donald Trump's misinformation.

And that's part of a longstanding and I think fine critique of the Trump presidency. Like, you know, Trump has lied compulsively, not least about the results of elections. But you can believe that and still realize that there are significant things that the Biden team and Biden himself said and promoted and argued that just did not match up with them. Call it the lived experience of American voters. And

And one of those was that inflation is transitory. It's not a big deal. Don't worry. You know, it's all going to be fine. The border situation, it's a challenge. It's not a crisis. It's not as bad as it seems. And it was far too late by the time they realized that a no one was buying that because it wasn't true.

And I mean, you know, you can add the Biden not being too old for the presidency, you know, Biden never going to pardon Hunter, et cetera, et cetera. But just to stick to immigration and inflation, those were two things where.

Forget what he was doing. What he was saying just didn't match up with the reality that American voters saw. So with all that, was his presidency a failure, a tragedy? Carlos, what's your general ruling? In the long term, like I wouldn't say this was a failed presidency or a tragedy. Like more than that, I think it was just kind of miscast. Biden wanted to be president for so long.

And he failed at that so many times. He was always more a creature of the Senate than of the White House. He struggled to articulate why he wanted to become president. When he finally got it, it was not because the party or the country had fallen in love with him. The country was hoping that Biden could bring sort of normalcy contrasting to the pandemic era Trump administration. So he pitched himself as a transitional figure, but then wanted to become a transformative figure. And that ambition changed.

torpedoed him and the party in 2024. Frank Ford's book on Biden called The Last Politician. He said that Biden developed a heroic self-conception. He pitched both 2020 and 2024 as these battles for democracy, right? And I think he was correct on the substance, but not on the politics. It wasn't what people were grasping for at the time. Even his campaign pollster once said, no one knows what this soul of America bullshit means. And he

I think that compulsion to sort of to become president at all costs, to be a transformative one, not a not a transitional one, and then to want to hold on to it because that's what presidents want, ended up being the the reasons that I sort of see him as kind of miscast for the role. OK, let's pause here. And when we come back, I want to take us further back in history, see how Biden's legacy may stack up against other one term presidents.

And we're back. Oh, how I've missed saying that. Now I want your thoughts on how Biden compares to other one-term presidents, H.W. Bush or Carlos's presidential obsession, the dearly departed Jimmy Carter, who, as it happens, has been lying in state this week here in Washington. So I guess, Carlos, why don't you start us off? Is there anything in particular that stands out for you in this department?

Sure. I mean, I think it's probably easiest to compare Carter and Biden. Both grappled with high inflation, foreign crises that they kind of struggled to resolve. One irony is that Biden's been around so long that in one of his memoirs, he writes about how he considered challenging Carter for the nomination in 1980 when he was a young senator. But this is actually very telling. He writes, I knew we Democrats were in trouble. Everything Carter touched seemed to turn to dust in his hands.

And he concluded that Carter was, quote, a man of decency and a man of principle. But that wasn't enough. And I don't know, that doesn't sound too distant from what one might say about Biden himself. God has an ironic sense of humor. In any case, what's interesting to me when you start comparing presidents and legacies and even just these one term ones, right, is that these legacies really change.

evolve over time. Bush went from being the out-of-touch patrician who didn't understand grocery scanners into a model for kind of vital but prudent foreign policy. You know, Carter, the one president no Democrat ever wanted to be compared to. You know, we've seen in recent days how there are revisionist retrospectives on his record, on human rights, and his impact on the judiciary. Gerald Ford, who we don't think about in this context very much because it didn't even serve a full

you know, received so much criticism for his pardon of Nixon, which for many has been revised into an act of patriotism, something the country needed to move on. So right now it's hard to see the Biden legacy beyond the immediate events of 2024. Eventually we will. You know, I don't know what direction the legacy will move in, but I'm very confident that it's going to change. Well, I think we can't assess it decisively, but I do really think the options are there.

bad and worse for Biden, especially relative to a figure like Carter, just because there's no there. You know, there's some overlap between the two men, things Carter did that ended up having a big impact after his presidency failures or sort of perceived weakness in foreign policy. But there's no Carter equivalent of

Biden's being too old for office from the beginning, having that effectively covered up and papered over by his staff, deciding through whatever process to run for reelection despite everyone around him having to know that this was a bad idea, and then having that lead his party into a disaster that that was a sort of unthinkable

unparalleled cluster bleep for the Democrats. And that that makes me my expectation is that there are two scenarios. In scenario one, Donald Trump's presidency is second term is either similar to his first term or perceived as more successful.

And in that world, Biden will be regarded as this kind of semi-senile embodiment of a failing liberalism that ultimately couldn't reckon with Donald Trump's transformative populism. Okay, that's not a good judgment. Scenario B, Donald Trump is an authoritarian nightmare, the likes of which some people expect.

In that scenario, Joe Biden is the semi-senile guy who failed to stop an authoritarian nightmare from coming to America. So in scenario A, he's like a kind of...

last figure of a failing consensus who then shuffles off the stage. That's pretty bad. In scenario B, he's like James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce, right? The last presidents before a total disaster for America. So if Trump succeeds in any way, Biden looks quite bad. And if Trump is a nightmare, then Biden looks even worse. I just don't... So you see no path for restoration. You agree, Carlos? Um...

No, I guess one thing, Ross, you're making me think about is that – and we should acknowledge this up front in any of these discussions of legacy – is that legacies are largely the result of what presidents do, the events that transpire during their terms. But they also, in part, result from –

I hate to say this, people like us, right? From journalists. Also from historians and intellectuals who write about them and weigh in on them and develop narratives about them, right? Like presidents know this, which is why they're always convening these ridiculous roundtables of historians and big thinkers to help them think about their place in history. So a lot of this discussion just feeds the kind of

Meechum Beschloss Kearns Goodwin Douthit industrial complex, right? You're part of the problem, Ross. Ah, to have Doris Kearns Goodwin's book sales. We all dabble in that. And kind of what you're saying, Ross, is that the Biden legacy is going to be determined by whatever Trump does, not by what Biden did himself. And that either way, Biden was kind of wrong, right? If Trump

you know, is an authoritarian nightmare, which is exactly what Biden had been warning about all this time, even if the public didn't buy that critique, then it's all Biden's fault because he let it happen by sort of staying too long. If democracy emerges unscathed from Trump part two, meaning that Biden was entirely wrong about the Trump threat,

then paradoxically, he'll look better in the eyes of history. Like it's a remarkable lesson in like the paradoxes of politics and legacy right there. When I think about the Biden legacy, for me, a big part of it is that instead of being the bridge that he said he was going to be to a new generation of democratic leadership, he ended up being a bridge connecting two Trump presidencies, right? He's an interregnum, he's an in-between. Even the Biden presidency will always be subsumed as part of the Trump legacy.

era. And that's how I think about it more than like, was it terrible or just slightly somewhat terrible? Is that Biden failed to make a lasting mark in the era when he finally got the job he always wanted? So I want to take it in just a slightly different direction as as Biden is a cautionary tale for this time period we're in anyway, where America is

just is graying more generally. But I do think in a lot of voters' minds, he came to represent a cultural moment in which you just, you can't root out some of these folks who have been around for so long and still think they should be

running the joint and won't let go. So I know that is not specifically a presidential legacy, but it is one of those things that I like to throw out there periodically because we still have a lot of political leaders who are doing this. I mean, and our current president is not a spring chicken. And I see us potentially heading down that path as well. I mean, there I'll be slightly optimistic and say that the age issue turned out to be so catastrophic.

for Biden, that I think it does maybe set us up for a world where people in both parties feel more comfortable easing people out, pushing people out when appropriate. So I don't know. I think the shadow of what happened with Biden

will loom over both parties in ways that might help us escape gerontocracy faster than they otherwise would have. That would be great. That would be like a very broad upside. New Year's optimism. So I'm thinking we'll leave it there. It's going to be a magical year. Everybody just buckle up.

You know, you got to say this for the Trump administration. It's never boring. There will be much for us to talk about. But for now, we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, we're going to get hot and cold. And finally, it is time for a hot cold, which I'm sure everyone has missed, particularly Carlos. It's Carlos's favorite part of the day. Sigh. Insert sigh here. Stop. You're such a you're such a moopy puppy. I think I think you mean a moopy puppy, Michelle.

From our inbox, listener Rachel Schwartzbard asked us all to share something we are looking forward to this year. So, my beloved co-hosts, what are you hot on for 2025 is where we're going to go. And I'll go first. Thank you. Because I am such a good host. This year, I've got a very broad one. During a campaign year...

My life becomes completely kind of consumed by campaign travel, reading polls, looking at focus groups. That's all I have brain space for. And so the year after a presidential campaign cycle is kind of magic. You get to take a breath, think about something positive.

Perhaps more restorative. It sounds really cheesy, but that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm looking forward to not completely being driven by the political horse race news cycle of a presidential campaign here. Next. Who's up? All right. I guess it'll be me. I thought about sticking to type and picking some books I'm looking forward to, but I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that. The old bait and switch. I'm not even going to casually mention the books that I would have mentioned, therefore sneaking in two things I'm hot for. I won't do that. Wait, no, no, wait, wait. Give me one book. One book you're excited for. You know, I never know. Like people say like the most anticipated books of whatever. And I don't know what means anticipated, right? Like I know there's authors who I like. I read a lot of nonfiction. So, yeah.

One novel that I'm actually excited about, it's called Audition. It's by Katie Kitamura, who's a writer who I really appreciate both her fiction and her

and her nonfiction. She had a novel called Intimacies a couple of years ago that I thought was fantastic. So I'm looking forward to Audition. I haven't read an early copy. I have no idea if it's any good, but I like her. But no, here, I'm going to pick something that may already be moot, even by the time this podcast airs. About a year ago on this show, in fact, an early January episode of Matter of Opinion, I did Hot Cold and I said I was hot on the new college football playoff system.

to determine a national champion, which would be a 12-team playoff rather than the final four picked by a committee. And I joked that I liked it in part because my school, Notre Dame, had a better chance of making the 12-team playoff. Well, fast forward one year, and we're in the middle of the college football playoff. Not only did Notre Dame make the field, but it has won its first two playoff games against Indiana and against Georgia.

and is playing in the semifinal against Penn State. It has been a joy for me and for every fan of the Fighting Irish to watch this team over the course of the playoffs. But now I should say, we're recording this on Wednesday.

The semifinal game is on Thursday. So by the time you hear this, Notre Dame may already be eliminated or may have advanced to the national championship game against the winner of Ohio State, Texas. And since we never talk about sports on Matter of Opinion, to my great lament and sadness, I thought I would sneak it in now. I'm hot on the playoff and hot on the Irish. That's beautiful. I'll be over for game day. Um...

So, you know, there was a time when I sort of organized my weekend evenings around prestige television shows. We sort of we lived through a golden age of television and then a kind of silver age of television where the shows weren't quite as good, but there were a ton of them.

And now in the aftermath of the streaming bubble bursting and various other changes, I feel like television is in danger of slowly becoming a wasteland again, which is why I am looking forward to the current great exception, which is White Lotus season three. And for those who don't know, this is a sort of.

dramedy of manners, I guess you could call it, set in a fictional luxury hotel called the White Lotus.

created and written by Mike White. It's not the greatest show on earth, but the first two seasons have been extremely entertaining. It works as kind of escapism. No, I think it's better than, I mean, again, it's not the soprano. It's rich people behaving ridiculously. It's rich people behaving badly, yes. It's not The Sopranos and it's not Breaking Bad, but I just think it just is a cut above a lot of what is being offered in serial TV right now and I'm glad it's coming back. Fair enough.

I really enjoyed the first two seasons. I'm looking forward to that, too. Yeah, it's drama also. Violent crime is always part of this. So that's also kind of— There's a death. So you get it all. Kind of fun. You get all the goodies. Nobody said they're looking forward to the great achievements of the second Trump administration. Nobody brought up Greenland. I'm looking forward to America once again becoming a colonial power. We're looking forward to colonizing Mars in particular. Yeah.

I'm concerned that Elon has been distracted from Mars by the federal budget. And that, I think, would be unfortunate. But we can talk about that in the future. There's a Shakespearean tragedy. I'm so happy to be back. All right. Good to be back. Happy New Year.

Thanks for joining our conversation. Give Matter of Opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there to let other people know why they should listen. Do you have a question for us based on something we talked about today? If so, we want to hear it. Share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440 and we might just respond to it in an upcoming episode. You can also email us at matterofopinion at nytimes.com.

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