Biden’s poignant farewell dwells on his fears for the country he loves

CNN
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President Joe Biden said his presidency would be a bridge — and it was.

But he did not build it into a promised new democratic generation.

Instead, he is the president who stayed too long, whose administration thus bowed out between two terms for a nemesis he once defeated and then allowed back into power: Donald Trump.

To call this Biden’s political tragedy would be harsh. After all, this is a man who lived endless personal anguish after burying his first wife and two of his children. But that is the fate he has been given by history – and his own grave choice error.

That dark reality overshadowed Biden’s farewell speech Wednesday night — his latest attempt to write a first draft of the history of a presidency he insists is worth far more than a single term of infamy.

“My eternal thanks to you, the American people,” the president said from the Oval Office just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast. “After 50 years of public service, I give you my word, I still believe in the idea that this nation stands for, a nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.”

But by Monday afternoon, the enemy that Biden warned in 2020 represented a mortal threat to America’s soul will be back behind the Oval Office, with Biden entering a Delaware retirement and leaving the country to face what than happens.

With this in mind, Biden used his address to warn of the threat he believes Trump’s second term — and what he styled his successor’s band of “robber barons” — represents. If anything, he seems to think the existential danger is greater now than it was when he launched his 2020 campaign.

“Tonight, I want to warn the country about some things that give me great concern,” Biden said. He cited “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” and sounded the alarm about “dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”

Like President George Washington in his farewell address, Biden warned of storms gathering around democracy.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair chance for everyone to get ahead,” he said.

And echoing President Dwight Eisenhower, who conjured up the threat of the military-industrial complex when he left the White House, Biden spoke of a new age of dangers, like social media and artificial intelligence and the tech bro-billionaires and millionaires packing Trump’s incoming. administration.

“I am equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that could also pose real dangers to our country,” Biden said. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling … social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is being suffocated by lies told for power and for profit.”

Biden was resolute and collected as he spoke, with a photo of his late son Beau, who died of brain cancer, on the table over his left shoulder. However, the burden of a grueling four-year presidency ending in his ninth decade was poignantly evident in his husky voice and slurred in his words. If Biden is still about to be president, age stripped him of the power to sell his ideas and paint the national narrative months ago.

Viewers were left to wonder how Biden ever concluded he would be fit to serve a full second term that would have taken him to the age of 86.

The end of a career and a political era

Biden didn’t just say goodbye to the country Wednesday night.

He pulled down the blinds on the only adulthood he’s ever known—his decades as senator, vice president, and president, and the undefeated ambition that sustained him through rounds of personal torment. He arrived in Washington as a young senator, already tipped as the future commander-in-chief half a century ago.

Back then, Mao Zedong led China, Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist, and Richard Nixon worked in the office from which Biden spoke Wednesday.

So the 82-year-old president was closing a political era — and a connection with the 20th century and a worldview he shared with all his modern predecessors, but one built around the system of American alliances that won Cold War.

Biden was born in 1942 when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House, but will hand over power on Monday afternoon to a successor who appears intent on tearing down the West’s geopolitical infrastructure as FDR first envisioned.

One of the ironies of Biden’s long, excruciating farewell that has unfolded since Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election in November was that, at least on paper, he can claim one of the more successful one-term presidencies.

Biden brought the US economy back from the Covid-19 pandemic so mismanaged by Trump with greater growth and job creation than all of America’s main competitors. His legislative haul is more impressive than Trump’s first term and the two terms of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Some would say he is the most prolific signer of follow-up legislation since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, having passed major pandemic recovery bills, a rare bipartisan infrastructure measure and new laws to revive manufacturing and create a new American semiconductor industry. He lowered the price of some prescription drugs, a feat that was overshadowed by Trump’s return when it recently took effect.

He pointed out that these bills could have significant long-term effects that may well outlast his presidency. They are key to any potential reappraisal of the Biden legacy for decades to come. All were designed by working-class Joe Biden of Scranton, Pennsylvania, to uplift the working class, cast aside in an age of globalization and getting less than most in Trump’s massive first-time tax cut. The irony, however, is that the blue-collar Democratic base fell on his watch, completing Trump’s transformation of the GOP and paving his way back to power.

Abroad, Biden stepped into the void left by Trump’s initial disdain for America’s allies. He managed to save Ukraine from Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion while avoiding tipping the US into a war with a nuclear-armed rival. Presidents don’t get credit in their time for disasters that are avoided. But this critical achievement is often ignored by hawks who complain that Biden gave Ukraine enough weapons to survive but not to win.

In Asia, Biden tightened American alliances and largely adopted Trump’s confrontational turn toward China. But his rant about “America is back” after he kicked his predecessor out of the White House now rings hollow among world leaders besieged by global populism, which must now deal with Trump’s return.

Biden is leaving office at a time when an overwhelming majority of Americans have turned their backs on his presidency.

According to a new CNN/SSRS poll released Wednesday, his approval rating is at an all-time low. Even fewer rate his performance favorably on immigration (31%), foreign affairs (32%) or the economy (33%).

In retrospect, Biden’s remarks were based on four historical mistakes, which involved the White House telling Americans that events they could see unfolding with their own eyes did not actually take place.

In truth, Biden’s presidency ended in 10 excruciating minutes in Atlanta in June, when his advanced age and clouded mental capacity were revealed in a CNN debate with Trump. In a devastating blow, after an incomprehensible Biden statement, the Republican nominee said what millions at home were thinking: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Clips of that meeting will be played — likely along with a younger Ronald Reagan’s rejection of the age question — for as long as televised debates take place.

Future generations will not remember the younger Biden – the smart, handsome senator and politician who kept getting knocked down by life but always got back up, or the grandfather with a twinkle in his eye and a sea of ​​empathy in his heart who voters chose in 2020 to restore some semblance of normalcy in the midst of the pandemic. They want to see him at his most fragile and ineffective. And unlike Jimmy Carter, whom Biden paid tribute to in one of his final acts as president, the outgoing commander-in-chief won’t have decades to reshape the reputation of his lone tenure.

As he closed his address, his political energy nearly exhausted, Biden was like the old magician Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” alone on stage when his “charm is all gone.”

“Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame, may you keep the faith, Biden told the country.

“I love America. You love it too. God bless you all.”