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Since the election of Donald Trump as the 47th president on Nov. 5, the slow-building fury among Democrats against President Joe Biden has reached a fever pitch. Some have even compared him to Paul von Hindenburg, the elderly German caretaker president who agreed to elevate Adolph Hitler to power in 1933. And while he should never have made the destructive decision to run for a second term, Biden is no Hindenburg. He was a capable president who pushed major reforms through one of the most closely divided congresses in American history, and if our democratic institutions hold through 2028, his achievements will be better appreciated with time and perspective.
It seems forgotten that in the weeks after Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, it was not clear that Democrats would hold a Senate majority at all. Pessimism about Biden's ability to govern set in quickly, and even after Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff improbably swept the double-barrel Georgia run-offs to give Democrats a 50-50 Senate "majority" it was not clear how much Biden would be able to get done. And I think if you had told Democrats in, say, December 2020 what Biden would be able to get through Congress, they would have been shocked–in a good way.
One roadblock, named Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), was known well in advance, but Biden quickly realized he had another "maverick" thorn in his side in the form of then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Sinema spiked popular ideas like a hike in the minimum wage, and Manchin held up Biden's signature Build Back Better initiative for what seemed like ages and ultimately stripped a lot of crowd-pleasers out of it, including paid family and medical leave. Manchin was also directly responsible for letting the pandemic-era Child Tax Credit (CTC) expire. And while Biden never used the bully pulpit to push for it, Manchin and Sinema were the chief obstacles to any kind of filibuster carve-out for voting rights or codifying Roe after the Dobbs disaster.
In spite of all that, and even with an incredibly thin Democratic majority in the House, Biden did accomplish a lot. While Trump did nothing about infrastructure other than tweet about it, Biden signed a major bill in November 2021 that invested a trillion dollars in repairing and renewing the country's transportation infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act set the United States on a new green industrial trajectory that even Trump and his minions will have trouble reversing. The CHIPs and Science Act was a landmark, bipartisan effort to reshore critical manufacturing industries whose supply chain vulnerabilities had been badly exposed by the pandemic. And while it has come under significant fire because of the 2021-2022 inflation crisis, the 2021 American Rescue Plan likely helped put the United States back on track for the fastest and most robust economic recovery in the G8.
Biden signed other bills that will grow in the public's esteem with time. The bipartisan 2022 reform of the Electoral Count Act was a deeply underappreciated effort to reinforce America's democratic guardrails after Trump's post-election coup attempt in 2020. That bill effectively cut the GOP's conspiracy to steal the 2024 election—which turned out not to be necessary anyway!—off at the knees. He also worked with Congress to craft a backstop to the Obergefell same-sex marriage ruling in case America's rogue Supreme Court goes after LGBTQ rights next.
MAGA Republicans love their empty rhetoric about ending the "forever wars," but Biden went through with it when he decisively ended America's 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan in August 2021. All people seem to remember is the messiness of the exit process, but critics on the left and right had been demanding this exact thing for years. Biden's decision to back the beleaguered Ukrainians against an unprovoked Russian onslaught preserved–at least for now–the sovereignty of an ally on the front lines again Russian President Vladimir Putin's campaign of irredentist violence while expanding and reinforcing NATO.
Unfortunately, his steadfast belief that a commitment to institutions and normalcy in the Oval Office could break the Republican Party's MAGA fever turned out to be deeply deluded, and he failed in his central mission to turn the page on the Trump era. But Biden's basic human decency was another thing that will be much more widely appreciated as the 47th president brings his relentless circus of daily outrages, provocations and schoolyard taunts back into our lives. It was nice, for example, not to have to wake up every day and wonder if the president was about to make dick jokes at the expense of the unstable, reclusive leader of an authoritarian country with nuclear weapons aimed at our cities.
Did Joe Biden have his flaws? You'll get no argument here from me and I have not been shy about pointing them out. From his refusal to extend that basic human decency to the Palestinian people to the failure to move more quickly to hold Trump accountable for his effort to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election, his mistakes were not just inexplicable but highly consequential. Even his decision to choose the politically flawed Kamala Harris as his running mate and then turn the nomination over to her in July 2024 without any internal Democratic Party process will be rightly second-guessed for many years.
So yes, Biden shares some blame for the disastrous outcome of the 2024 election, but it is important for Democrats to rationally assess his presidency rather than tossing it wholesale onto the funeral pyre. To paraphrase Michael Moriarty at the end of the 1973 baseball classic Bang the Drum Slowly, Biden wasn't a bad president—no worse than most, and probably better than some. You might miss him more than you think you will.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
