Joe Biden has never hidden his ambition to be president or his resentment at having felt underestimated for most of his long career.
It took him three attempts to reach the White House. When he first started competing in 1987, he was 44; when he finally won the prize he was seeking, in 2020, he was 77.
That victory didn’t come easy, either. In 2020, when Biden finished fourth in the Iowa primary and fifth in the New Hampshire primary, pundits wrote him off as dead. But he shook off the naysayers to win the Democratic nomination and defeated then-President Trump by a convincing 4.5-point margin in the popular vote in November.
Long before 2020, persistence in the face of adversity was Biden’s story. His national political career began in tragedy when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident shortly before his first inauguration as a senator in 1973.
“When you get knocked down, you get up,” he said after every setback in his life (and there were many).
When Biden was right, that tenacity was one of his most useful traits. When he was wrong, it looked more like stubbornness.
That’s certainly how it’s played out over the past six months, as Biden pushed back on all evidence that his advancing age was not only creating doubt among voters but also crippling his ability to run an effective campaign.
Depending on the outcome of the November election following his late decision to retire, his lifelong obstinacy may have been his tragic flaw.
Today, four years later, it’s almost difficult to remember how perfectly 2020 candidate Joe Biden rose to the occasion. He ran a campaign promising to “heal the soul of the nation” after four years of chaotic governance under the Trump administration culminated in a disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The election brought not only victory to Biden, but also Democratic control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The new but septuagenarian president took the opportunity to pass a series of long-sought liberal priorities. As a sign of his ambition, he hung a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the transformative Democratic leader of the 20th century, in the Oval Office.
In his first two years in office, using legislative skills he prided himself on as a senator and vice president, he enacted a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill; a clean energy bill that was the largest climate-related program in American history; and major programs to fund manufacturing and technology.
He also passed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill to speed the end of the recession caused by the pandemic. Many economists say the massive stimulus contributed to a surge in inflation in 2022 and 2023, but it also caused the U.S. economy to rebound faster and more strongly than those of most other industrial nations.
That list did not match the momentous achievements of FDR's New Deal, but it was comparable to Lyndon B. Johnson's record on civil rights, voting rights, and Medicare.
As the 2022 congressional elections approached, rising prices weighed on Democrats’ popularity, and pundits predicted a “red wave.” Biden waged the campaign as a defense of democracy against Trump and “MAGA Republicans.” Some Democrats warned that it was a losing message, but Biden stood firm. A surprisingly high percentage of voters unhappy with the economy voted for Democrats, allowing them to maintain control of the Senate and lose fewer seats in the House of Representatives than expected.
In retrospect, that moment — the end of 2022 — was the height of Biden’s power.
With the House in Republican hands, he would no longer be able to pass important legislation. He would have to concentrate on implementing the programs already approved and preparing to run for a second term, if he so chose.
During the 2020 campaign, he said he considered himself a “transitional president,” a wise veteran who would send Trump into retirement and pass the baton to a new generation. Now it seems he never meant it.
Now that he was in the office he had long wanted to occupy, he was in no hurry to leave. And when Trump announced in November 2022 that he would run again, Biden decided that he was still the indispensable man for his party.
His wife, Jill, son, Hunter, and the rest of his family confirmed the decision during Thanksgiving in Nantucket.
Biden had just turned 80, and most voters already said he was too old for a second term. Most Democratic voters said they wanted someone else to run, but there was no formal debate within the party; as the sitting president, the decision was up to Biden.
When asked by reporters if he had the energy for another campaign, his invariable response was: “Look at me.”
In retrospect, that was the moment Biden should have decided not to run. He would have emerged victorious.
It could have paved the way for his party to hold an open nominating contest, with two full years for contenders to organize their campaigns.
In September 2023, three-quarters of all voters, including a majority of Democrats, told pollsters they thought the president was too old to run again.
Biden's life experience proved the critics wrong. This time, they didn't.
“I believe I am the most qualified person to run for president. I beat him once and I will beat him again,” he said at a press conference on July 11. “I have more work to do.”
But that was two weeks after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, when he proved unable to defend his own accomplishments coherently or refute Trump's torrent of misstatements and outright lies.
Panic spread among Democrats who believed they were headed for a defeat that would give Trump control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
For three weeks, Biden remained stubborn. He had defeated critics and pundits before and seemed confident he could do it again. But his allies were deserting him. On Sunday, he caved, with a letter of grim eloquence, as if dictated through clenched teeth.
We still don't know how this story will end.
If Vice President Kamala Harris or another Democrat wins the November election, Biden will be remembered as a stunningly successful one-term president whose withdrawal was a heroic sacrifice that saved his party’s future.
But if Trump returns to the White House and Republicans take control of Congress, Biden will not only see the central purpose of his 2020 campaign destroyed, but many of his legislative achievements could potentially be repealed.
Biden's successes could yet turn to ashes, and the tragedy will be that his stubbornness was partly to blame.
