At the end of 2022, I observed in these pages that “at this [halfway] point in his term,” I considered President Joe Biden to be most consequential president America had had since Franklin Roosevelt.
I will spare you an extended litany of pros and cons of the Biden presidency; you have lived the last four years. Although the President’s defenders are now touting his many substantive achievements, four aspects stand out to me: the effective manner in which his Administration dispensed the COVID vaccines becoming available as he took office, reviving a country literally and figuratively crippled by the pandemic; the manner in which he led an economy – which at the time he took office economists were debating only whether it was headed for a “hard” or soft” landing — through four years of uninterrupted growth; the manner in which he protected America and other global democracies by fostering cohesion among NATO allies when Russia invaded Ukraine at a point that the alliance was in its greatest disarray since its founding; and – perhaps most importantly – the decent, stable, open manner in which he conducted the presidency.
That said, they don’t render a final assessment of a starter’s performance when he’s halfway through the ballgame. Mr. Biden’s second half wasn’t as strong as his first half; he didn’t aggressively address the chaos existing at our southern border until too late, and — crucially, even aside from the ultimate political ramifications – he should have recognized in late 2022 that he substantively simply didn’t have the strength to perform his office effectively for another six years, no matter whom the Republicans nominated.
Ever since starting these pages, I have had the idea of doing a post setting forth my ranking of the worst to the best American presidents of my lifetime (which, despite the hoary nature of these entries, only extends as far back President Harry Truman 🙂 ). If I ever do write such a note, I now expect that Mr. Biden will be placed not at the top, but somewhere in the middle, alongside Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Mr. Johnson’s extraordinary domestic policy achievements were ultimately overshadowed by Vietnam. Mr. Nixon’s extraordinary foreign policy achievements were ultimately overshadowed by Watergate.
While I place exceptional weight on the fact that Mr. Biden is a genuinely good man who means well, in 2020 he didn’t run for president and we didn’t elect him for his managerial, economic, or even foreign policy acumen. He ran and we hired him to perform one mission: rid us of Donald Trump.
He didn’t.
McCoy's Noise 