Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to the D.C. Emergency Operations Center, Tuesday, July 2, 2024, in Washington.
The Supreme Court, says one historian, just might have given presidents fewer constitutional constraints than King George III had in 1776 . The presidency is “an office that not only tests your judgment, perhaps even more importantly it’s an office that can test your character,” Joe Biden said in a short response Monday. Indeed, I’ve been thinking about the old-fashioned question of the role of character in public life all week. Though this president might not approve of the conclusions I’ve drawn.
For a good four years or so, dating from the Zoom-shrunken 2020 Democratic National Convention, I had been awed by Joe Biden’s character. Over the first several decades of his more than fifty-year political career, he led the way in guiding the Democratic Party toward embracing policy positions that were terrible. But by the time he was running for President in 2020, when the errors of his ways became evident, he did a series of 180s, and he put his shoulder to the wheel to repair the damage.
In 1972, in an ad for his first Senate campaign, he said that drug dealers, as “potential killers,” should be treated the way “we track down killers.” In 1993, arguing for the mass-incarceration law that he boasted should be called the “Biden Bill,” he said of the “predators on our streets” that “we have no choice but to take them out of society,” though he also questioned whether they deserved to be considered part of it in the first place. “It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to be socialized into the fabric of society… they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife…”
Then, as president, he nominated public defenders to lifetime appointments as federal judges.
A neoliberal bellwether in the 1970s, he complained that Democrats fighting for a law requiring a federal guarantee of full employment were not “cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems.” Then, in the 2000s, he sponsored a successful bankruptcy “reform” that took away from millions of Americans one of the few limited, finite tools government indisputably did have to deal with people’s problems: forgiving debts, including debilitating and unfair medical debts.
Then as president he did more to restore government’s role in dealing with people’s problems than any president in 40 years, including more to fight the scourge of medical debt than any president, ever.
In the run-up to the Afghanistan war, the Bush administration put before Congress an Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Biden assured The New York Times it was nothing like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, that this authorization was limited and temporary. He had been bamboozled, perhaps willfully. The AUMF is still in effect, used to justify military activity in twenty-two countries. The next year, leading hearings on whether to authorize war in Iraq, he blocked witnesses with proof that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction—but hosted three witnesses who passed on the lie that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden.
Then, in 2021, he unilaterally ended the Afghanistan War, in brave defiance of the entirety of the security establishment.
He became the first president to walk a picket line. He turned the Federal Trade Commission back into a scourge of monopolists. He wrenched away the Democratic Party from a tepid centrism, ever following the lead of the Republican Party, into a vehicle for a fighting, populist liberalism. Having helped to preside over its retreat from an agenda of social justice, he did more than anyone else to bring it back. Very few politicians risk change like that. That was character.
But by the time Biden decided to let Israel get away with slaughter in Gaza, I stopped admiring Joe Biden’s character.
Indeed, I had stopped long before that. It happened when I realized that what I thought was his most impressive display of character had been but a mirage.
That came in March of 2020, after he’d clinched the nomination but before he’d picked a running mate, when he said, “I view myself as a bridge, nothing else. There’s an entire generation of leaders… They are the future of this country.” He was pledging, I let myself hear, to pass the torch to a new generation of Democrats after a single term. This, I decided, was a mensch.
I was wrong. If that’s what he meant, he broke his word: bad enough. Worse, it now seems more likely that he was taking people like me for suckers. He had assuaged our concerns that it was a terrible idea for a president to serve until he was 86, obscuring that he intended to hold on to power for as long as he possibly could, no matter what.
Reagan’s age had been a public obsession in 1980, when the old cowboy was 69, the age Dwight D. Eisenhower, a kind of national grandfather, was when he left office.
JOE BIDEN IS HARDLY ALONE among public officials who become so entranced with power that they consider it their birthright, determined to hold on to it long after they ought. It’s corollary to the phenomenon that every senator—I’ve heard—looks in the mirror and sees a president staring back; or instinctually throws their arms back when they walk outside into a cold day because they know there will be someone there to slip on their coat.
But the lengths to which the president and his team have avoided the issue made last week’s debate all the more bracing. I can’t vouch for the veracity of the rumor that in the West Wing, even bringing up the matter of age around the boss is taboo. True or not, it doesn’t matter. The buck stops here: that was the famous placard displayed on that Harry Truman’s Oval Office desk. The question is one of character. Biden should have accepted that he simply wasn’t capable of selling his vitality to the electorate in a reelection fight. And most of us haven’t had the character to admit how bad it has become.
Biden is not even alone among presidents in tendering vague hints they might serve only one term. The evening after his surprise landslide over Jimmy Carter in 1980, ABC News’s Frank Reynolds interviewed Ronald Reagan: “Many people believe that you intend to serve only one term, because of your age. Are they right?” The president-elect replied, “I have no way of answering that.”
Reagan’s age had been a public obsession in 1980, when the old cowboy was 69, the age Dwight D. Eisenhower, a kind of national grandfather, was when he left office. “At 65 years of age,” the New York Times concluded oracularly when Reagan’s 1976 primary bid against Gerald Ford failed, he was “too old to consider seriously another run at the presidency.”
The age problem was an obsession for Reagan’s strategists, too, even though the public overwhelmingly told the campaign’s pollsters it wouldn’t affect their vote. As so often happens, however, party strategists followed the pundits, who hardly ever mentioned Reagan’s bid without flagging the issue. Even an article about the vogue in California for plastic surgery observed offhandedly of 1976, “Let’s just say that one fellow might be President of the United States if he’d gotten a facelift.”
The strategists’ solution to the problem of Reagan’s advanced age was to aggressively lean into it. His 69th birthday came during the heat of the stand-or-fall New Hampshire primary. After George H.W. Bush dealt him a humiliating upset in Iowa, they made a strategic pivot, doubling his scheduled events, challenging Bush to debates, and staging as many as five showy onstage birthday parties each day, where he would crack jokes bringing up the elephant in the room, before anyone else could—like the one that he was so old that he remembered what happened when a hot story broke and a reporter would sprint into the press room crying “Stop the chisels!”
The show of vitality was practicable because he could sell it. The same strategy, we now know, is not practicable for Joe Biden.
One week before that 69th birthday, Reagan was asked about the question of vitality on 60 Minutes. He replied that if he were president and enfeeblement “were a possibility, I’d be the first to recognize it, and the first to step down.” That’s ridiculous, of course, as so many of us who’ve white-knuckled it in the passenger seat with a parent of a certain age behind the wheel can attest, but it’s only the 1,402th most ridiculous thing Ronald Reagan has said; we expect ridiculousness from him. From our guy, we should be able to expect wisdom—precisely because he’s shown so much before.
REAGAN SECURED HIS SECOND TERM IN 1984 thanks in part to a snappy debate comeback that magically put the problem out of pundits and public’s mind. For the whippersnappers among my readers who don’t know it: Reagan, then age 73, was asked if he could go for days without sleep like John F. Kennedy had during the Cuban Missile crisis. He replied, referring to his opponent Vice President Walter Mondale, age 56, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” M-m-m-mic drop!
Then crazy stuff started leaking out during Reagan’s second term. The historian Richard Reeves, in President Reagan: The Triumph of the Imagination, relates this scene:
[Lesley] Stahl, along with her husband, a writer, and their eight-year-old daughter, Taylor, were invited into the Oval Office … She was stunned by how Reagan looked … His skin was like paper … She thought she could almost look through him … His eyes seemed milky and she wasn’t sure he actually knew who she was…
“He’s gone,” she thought. “I’m going to have to go out on that lawn and tell a camera the President of the United States is a doddering space cadet.”
Naturally, Lesley Stahl did not go forth and report that the president was a doddering space cadet; in 1986, media aristocrats arrogated themselves the obligation of hiding such useful knowledge from the public, same way they did about John F. Kennedy’s health, to protect “the presidency.”
But within official Washington, it had to be common knowledge. The Lesley Stahls of the world knew; and, duh, senators knew as well, even Democratic ones—certainly one from Delaware, then in the heat of his own presidential campaign, upon whom it apparently made no serious moral impression.
Luckily, there was no Cuban Missile Crisis in 1987. Unfortunately, the chances for something like it seem pretty damned high by 2029.
AND NOW WE FIND OURSELVES IN J.R.R. TOLKEIN’S REALM: the ring of power and all that. Here’s a funny story I ran across from Biden’s hometown Wilmington Morning News in my research for Reaganland. Ted Kennedy was challenging Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Biden is described as a sexy young up-and comer “popular among ethnic Democrats and young women.” The lede has a young housewife insisting he sign her living room wall, and he does: “‘Joe Biden, USS 1980’ in red ink a foot long.” He endorses the incumbent, if lukewarmly: “Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming… He’s not going down in the history books… but he is doing a good job.” Then, he drafts himself as Carter’s successor: “If you’re looking for an Irish Catholic to support, wait until 1984 and one of us will be back.”
Now he has The Precious. And he’s not letting go. There are those history books to think about, after all.
It’s not hard to imagine the presidency as a kind of drug. Did you ever see that 2000 picture The Contender, where Jeff Bridges as president shows off for a (Delaware!) congressman by calling down to the White House mess for a shark steak sandwich? “You know what this is? That’s a shark steak sandwich. Fucking shark steak. You want half?”
That arid narcissism is our Joe Biden now. It started when he broke his implied promise of March 2020 to make naming, grooming, and selling a second-term successor his priority, going four on the floor to keep his access to on-demand shark steak sandwiches instead.
So selfish. Why? Because he is right. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot,” he said in his speech on the third anniversary of January 6.
It’s an infernal conundrum. By his own logic, the more persuasive Biden is on that subject—the more it becomes plain that he believes it with every fiber of his being—and the more the evidence mounts of his un-electability… Well, two plus two equals four: the more willfully he betrays the future of democracy itself.
Joe, if you’re reading this: that may be how you go down in the history books.
The nerve you had yesterday, saying, “At the outset of our nation it was the character of George Washington, our first president, to define the presidency.” George Washington, as you know, defined the presidency by leaving from it, refusing to run for another term. He practiced character by showing the world how democracy, not power, could be public officials’ top priority.
Why can’t you show your character that way, too?
