The triumph and tragedy of Joe Biden’s life is that he got exactly what he wanted.
It’s not true that he ran in 2020 because he felt duty-bound to do so after seeing white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, though the president has made the claim so many times he may now truly believe it. According to multiple accounts, Biden and his team originally filmed an announcement video outside his childhood home in Scranton stressing his working-class roots, before scrapping it and seizing on Charlottesville as a rationale.
The White House was a boyhood dream; he wrote about it in the sixth grade. He was talking about the presidency before he was elected to anything, and as early as 1976, four years into his first Senate term, after he had shocked the state of Delaware with an insurgent, youth-driven campaign that no one, not even he himself, expected to have the legs it did. But sometimes dreams come with a price.
Biden surely did not imagine his career would end like this: one of the most unpopular presidents in history, forced out by his own party, after a weekend spent reportedly fuming in private at his betrayal, as one prominent Democrat after another abandoned him — all on the back of weeks of the entire country openly discussing, sometimes mocking, his mental competency. This is not how successful presidencies are supposed to end.
Democrats are heaping plaudits on Biden for the “heroism” he showed in deciding to step down, in the hope of emotionally smoothing his way out. But though he may bask in this public face-saving campaign that’s been launched for his benefit, it will do little to take out the sting. After all, more than anyone, Biden is aware this was never his decision.
Though he joins the ignominious one-term-presidents club, Biden can at least say he has outdone his peers in one key presidential category: bloodshed overseas. Finally achieving his political ambitions meant carrying out one the most heinous…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
