President Joe Biden’s legacy, in the short term at least, is likely to be marked by a sense of failure.
His first few years in office saw persistent inflation, with many Americans struggling to afford groceries, gas, and rent. As he heads out the door, a new CNN poll finds that just 36% of Americans approve of how he has handled the presidency, matching his previous low.
Why We Wrote This
President Joe Biden is leaving office after a single term that many Americans regard as unsuccessful. But history suggests his accomplishments could be viewed more favorably over time.
Perhaps most painful, Mr. Biden’s 50-plus years in public life are ending with an outcome he sought mightily to avoid: the return of Donald Trump.
Even a late-breaking ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas is unlikely to be seen as a clear win for Mr. Biden, with Mr. Trump being given as much or more credit for the achievement.
“Not a lot of one-term presidents are considered candidates for Mount Rushmore,” says Matthew Dickinson, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Yet Professor Dickinson and other presidential scholars don’t rule out the possibility that public estimation of Mr. Biden’s term could well improve over time. Biden defenders argue he deserves and will ultimately get credit for getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control, enacting a massive economic relief program, and working with Congress to pass major infrastructure and clean energy laws.
President Joe Biden’s legacy, in the short term at least, is likely to be marked by a sense of failure.
His first few years in office saw persistent inflation, with many Americans struggling to afford groceries, gas, and rent. Under his watch, record streams of migrants flooded across the U.S.-Mexico border. As he heads out the door, a new CNN poll finds that just 36% of Americans approve of how he has handled the presidency, matching his previous low.
Perhaps most painful, Mr. Biden’s 50-plus years in public life are ending with an outcome he sought mightily to avoid: the return of Donald Trump.
Why We Wrote This
President Joe Biden is leaving office after a single term that many Americans regard as unsuccessful. But history suggests his accomplishments could be viewed more favorably over time.
Even a late-breaking ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas is unlikely to be seen as a clear win for Mr. Biden, with Mr. Trump being given as much or more credit for the achievement. To many observers, it’s raising unmistakable parallels to another one-term president whose time in office was widely seen as unsuccessful: Jimmy Carter.
“Not a lot of one-term presidents are considered candidates for Mount Rushmore,” says Matthew Dickinson, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Yet Professor Dickinson and other presidential scholars don’t rule out the possibility that public estimation of Mr. Biden’s term could well improve over time. Biden defenders argue he deserves and will ultimately get credit for getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control and enacting a massive economic relief program. During his first two years in office, when Democrats controlled Congress, Mr. Biden passed major programs that are expected to deliver tangible results in coming years – including investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
Even now, the U.S. economy is outperforming much of the world, with unemployment at 4.1% and inflation at 2.9%. Some Democrats complain that their party had a messaging problem, not a policy problem, as President Biden reduced his interviews and public appearances and struggled to communicate effectively.
In his final days in office, Mr. Biden has used both his presidential power and his bully pulpit. He’s issued a raft of executive orders, and put out a 61-page memo touting his accomplishments. Wednesday night, he delivered a farewell address to the nation that was both hopeful and ominous.
Mr. Biden warned specifically of a growing concentration of riches in the United States, a veiled swipe at Mr. Trump and some of his most prominent supporters.
“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 shot for everyone to get ahead,” the president said in his speech. The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, has become a key Trump ally, and the next two wealthiest, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have also curried favor with the incoming president.
Over the long haul, the larger meaning of Mr. Biden’s one term remains fluid. Will it be seen as a brief interregnum that effectively stretched out Mr. Trump’s era of influence by four years? Or by denying Mr. Trump a second consecutive term in 2020, did Mr. Biden accomplish something more significant?
Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, argues that beating Mr. Trump in 2020 could turn out to be a key Biden legacy.
“It may very well be that an uninterrupted reign of a Trump presidency for eight years would have been markedly more disruptive than two separate intervals of a Trump presidency,” Professor Riley says.
Mr. Biden came to the presidency as the embodiment of the political establishment, an avatar of “normality.” He had served 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president before reaching the Oval Office. He also had a history as a centrist dealmaker, skills he honed in the Senate.
“He was nominated because he was going to move the Democratic Party back to the center, but he didn’t necessarily govern that way,” Professor Dickinson says. “I think that hurt him.”
Instead, Mr. Biden tacked left – leading to a “big government” ethos and legislation that added trillions to the national debt.
Of course, Mr. Trump was also a big spender, and the national debt rose even more during his first term than Mr. Biden’s. Whether Mr. Trump’s second-term plans to boost government efficiency and slash the federal workforce come to anything remain to be seen. For now, cutting or eliminating programs dear to Democrats is high on the list.
Mr. Biden’s decision to run for a second term, after strongly suggesting he wouldn’t, is another key part of his legacy. By the time the octogenarian dropped out of the race last July, after a disastrous debate performance, there was no time for a proper primary. Vice President Kamala Harris, as the emergency fill-in, narrowly lost the popular vote, and lost the Electoral College by a wider margin.
It may well be that no Democrat running on Mr. Biden’s record could have beaten Mr. Trump. Still, Mr. Biden will get credit in the history books for elevating the first woman to the vice presidency. After the Supreme Court’s historic overturning of the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, Ms. Harris became the administration’s most prominent voice on reproductive rights.
“She was a far more effective messenger on that than he was,” says Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
Mr. Biden is also credited with assembling a diverse Cabinet, and putting the first Black female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
A persistent challenge throughout the Biden term was the legal and personal troubles of his son. The only surviving child from Mr. Biden’s late first wife, Hunter Biden occupied a unique place in his father’s presidency, as a source of perpetual concern. When President Biden announced last month the unconditional pardon of his son, going back 11 years, he broke a repeated promise that he would not do that. The president’s regular oaths of “my word as a Biden” may now ring a bit hollow.
His son’s pardon also shined a light on the larger issue of alleged Justice Department weaponization. The two federal cases against Mr. Trump – now dismissed – helped fuel passions around his 2024 reelection, and could in turn spur efforts by the incoming Trump Justice Department to prosecute Biden allies.
Ultimately, the policy dimension of Mr. Biden’s one term will be his most durable legacy. In foreign affairs, the disastrous final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 may be the most memorable episode – a blow to Mr. Biden’s public approval from which he never recovered. His shoring up of international alliances and diehard support for Ukraine and Israel, amid brutal wars, underscored Mr. Biden’s identity as a globalist.
Wednesday’s announcement of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage deal brought back memories of President Carter, and the Iranian hostage crisis that helped make him a one-termer. Mr. Carter’s memorial service in Washington was just last week, making the parallel even sharper.
Mr. Carter is now remembered fondly by many for his decades-long post-presidency, marked by good works, rather than the missteps of his time in the White House. Of course, Mr. Carter was just 56 when he left office.
But historians point to other presidents whose public image improved, sometimes dramatically, years after they left office. The once deeply unpopular Harry Truman is now lauded for desegregating the military and supporting the creation of NATO.
Lyndon Johnson, who dropped his reelection bid amid growing protests over the Vietnam War, is now best known for signing major civil rights legislation and implementing his Great Society agenda, including creation of Medicare and Medicaid.
Mr. Biden made no secret of his desire to pass sweeping programs like the Great Society or Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But ultimately he had to trim back his Build Back Better agenda, which aimed for tax reforms, plus broad investment in infrastructure, environment, and healthcare. Some elements were implemented separately.
In his farewell address, Mr. Biden suggested history will be kind to his record.
“You know, it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”
