Evaluating the Biden Presidency - Lawyers, Guns & Money (2025)

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Evaluating the Biden Presidency - Lawyers, Guns & Money (1)By Erik Loomis

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On January 19, 2025

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At 10:05 am

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In General

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Well, this is the last day of a somewhat successful presidency that ended in mass failure.

I don’t think that historians have much more insight on immediately evaluating a presidency as anyone else who follows politics closely. But I also don’t think the Biden presidency is particularly hard to evaluate. The short version is that Biden was very good on policy and completely disastrous on politics. Biden never seemed to get that you need the second one for the first one to work.

A few general thoughts on both sides of this. On policy:

  1. First and foremost, Biden ended the American war in Afghanistan and that did nothing positive for him politically at all. No one gave him credit for it, the media turned on him, and even though there was zero path forward to anything that looked like stability in that nation, as it turned out, the forever wars aren’t exactly popular, but no one really cares about them. Not even the left, which liked to talk about how bad this was but didn’t give Biden any credit either. In a reasonable America, ending the war if Afghanistan, even if the Taliban did take back over, would have been a real positive for Biden. In truth, it was not and that’s for two basic reasons. First, foreign policy has a zero political constituency in this country and second, if it does, it’s that people like Americans kicking ass. Biden never seemed to understand any of this, but at the same time, he did the right thing. A frustrating situation.
  2. I continue to maintain that Biden was the best president for labor since at least FDR and anyone who disputes this simply doesn’t understand our labor history. Even if you think Biden was a UNIONBUSTER against the railroad workers, remember that when the railroad workers went on strike in the early 50s, Harry Truman wanted to draft them and send to the front lines of the Korean War and asked Congress for a bill to do that very thing! So even if you don’t agree with Biden on that issue, the history of presidents and the labor movement is just really depressing. Otherwise, there’s no question–Biden did whatever he could to help unions. But he didn’t have the power to do that much.
  3. Biden did what he could on student loans. The Supreme Court simply wasn’t going to let any real relief transform the lives of the American masses. He spent the whole presidency then trying to find ways to provide student loan forgiveness where he could.
  4. There are lots of other issues where Biden did what he could. One thing this presidency should do is kill the Green Lantern vision of the presidency dead. Joe Manchin simply had more power than Joe Biden did. The IRA is a great law, but Manchin made it much worse. Biden had good policy on Covid. Americans didn’t want that. Biden tried on climate change. Americans didn’t care. Biden did a pretty good job on environmental protection, but there’s not much of a political constituency for this anymore. We could go on.

But on politics, my God, Joe just did not get it.

  1. Merrick Garland. Enough said. One of the great disasters of American political history. Biden actually thought people wanted adults in the room. They did not. Biden actually believed that Americans wanted a nation where the government wasn’t politicized against the other party. They did not. Biden could not comprehend this. Merrick Garland was quite literally one of the worst appointments in American history.
  2. Biden had a hell of a tough situation to face with inflation and every government pretty much failed at it, so it’s hard to be overly critical here. But he never really got how this was going to torpedo Democratic chances and didn’t put enough pressure on the levers of the federal government to fight it, or at least look like he was fighting it, which matters more.
  3. The Old Man was old and he killed Democrats’ hopes of winning in 2024 by not admitting this. Sorry Joe, but a lot of Trump winning this year is on this choice. It doesn’t even matter that Trump is also old–politics is all about presentation, not reality. Trump plays crazy. Biden plays ancient. People in their 80s should never be president. The biggest political mistake of his life was not announcing after the 2022 midterms that he was not running.
  4. Biden was the right man for 2020. Democratic primary voters wanted Daddy and Daddy is what they got. The general public was sick enough of the Trump Show at that moment to elect Biden. But he had no mandate, no more than Trump does right now. He never seemed to understand that. He very much was not the right man for 2024. He only got that after embarrassing himself on the national stage and facing the biggest party revolt against a nominated candidate in American history.
  5. Biden never understood that Americans think the political system is broken. Regardless of the truth of this, what matters in politics is not reality. So when Biden did engage in good policy, which was often, it was never in a way that had a communications factor to it. It’s the old policy wonk “let’s transform America by making small changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit” gambit. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but policy people never understand what makes voters tick. That was most certainly Joe Biden and the people around him.

So in the end, how you evaluate Biden is going to depend on how you think about policy versus politics. But they are equally important, and if Biden was a top 10 president on the former, he made Jimmy Carter look like Theodore Roosevelt on the latter. Given the very real crisis of Donald Trump returning to the White House, which Biden seemed to prefer to ignore for the most part, I’d say that Biden is an averageish president, despite being so good on the details on policy. Maybe because of that, given how little he understood what was really happening on the ground.

I guess I should also mention Israel/Palestine. I do think Biden was terrible here, but I have no belief that he would gained politically from taking a harder stance on Israel. It’s the one issue in which Democratic coalition groups will kill each other over.

One thing that is very unlikely to change in the next four years is my belief that Donald Trump is the worst president in American history.

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Evaluating the Biden Presidency - Lawyers, Guns & Money (2025)

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