🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
As the Republican field of presidential candidates gets bigger and more contentious, Democrats remain unified around President Joe Biden. To a life-long Democrat this is a surprising (albeit welcome) state of affairs. After all, how many times have I heard people quote Will Rogers, the early 20th century actor and comedian who quipped for posterity–"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
In politics, timing is everything. Joe Biden ran for president in 1988 and in 2008 and did poorly both times. In 1988, he plagiarized a speech from the British Labour Party leader and was forced to make an embarrassing exit. In 2008, fate put him on the sidelines as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled it out for the nomination. He did, however, become Obama's vice president for eight years, and then passed up the chance to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016. By 2020, Biden was in the race once again, and once again, he seemed to be headed for what looked to be another humiliating finish.
But 2020 was different. The biggest difference was not Biden—he was pretty much the same old-fashioned, lovable, and wonky creature of Washington that he'd always been. And it wasn't the Democratic Party, which remained a loose coalition of liberals and people of color united by two broad general themes—that government should help the less fortunate and stay out of people's bedrooms.
By 2020, the country was in a crisis, the first pandemic in 100 years. As always happens, when people are in real trouble they look to the government to help, and they look to their president for steady reassurance. As president, Donald Trump was just the opposite; a shambolic leader who contradicted himself and his experts, who suggested maybe we should drink bleach to get rid of COVID-19, who did manage to get a vaccine developed but who then made common cause with the anti-vaxxers and couldn't develop a plan to get it into the arms of people who wanted it.
Serious times call for serious people, and finally, after 32 years it was Biden's turn. Had it not been for the pandemic Biden may never have been elected. But first the primary voters and then the November voters in the key swing states decided that Biden, in many ways the polar opposite of Trump, was just what the country needed.
At the end of his first term his biggest problem is something that neither he nor anyone else can do anything about. He's old. And yet, in the two most recent elections, 2020 and 2022, we saw that age didn't matter much—people can think Biden is too old, they can think someone else should run, and yet, when push comes to shove, they voted for Biden and Democrats anyway.
Biden has delivered exactly what America needed after the non-stop drama of the Trump administration. Vaccines got manufactured and into people's arms. The government provided relief for the hardest hit sectors of the economy; we are on our way to rebuilding bridges and roads. While standing up for basic human rights and privacy Biden has avoided being personally drawn into the culture wars that rage around him. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden showed a new generation of Americans what a foreign policy based on American values and careful strategy looked like. With the sole exception of the disastrous exit from Afghanistan which occurred early in the administration, Biden has been the sober leader that America wanted and needed.
However, Democrats may have reverted to their tendency to form a circular firing squad had it not been for the fact that the Republican Party has become the Trump Party—as angry, mean-spirited, and ineffectual as their leader. (Note that the other day the right wing of that party refused to vote for a rule their leadership wanted and shut the place down.) As long as Trump and his ilk are the alternative Biden will head a unified party and we will have to wait until 2028 and beyond for people to recall Will Rogers' famous description of the Democrats.
Elaine Kamarck is a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and author of Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
