Thanks, Joe

Let's Not Overlook the Remarkable Achievements of a Remarkable Statesman's Remarkable Presidency

In mere hours, the United States will begin to experience the final throes of the tyrannical decay its founders warned against so eloquently in the nation’s earliest moments. Like a lot of people, I have written plenty about that and I’m bound to write more. But these also are the final days of the most remarkable presidency in my lifetime. We won’t see another one like it. We should pause to say why and be grateful.

I came to know who Joe Biden is during the Iran-Contra affair in 1986-1987. In those days, Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a very thoughtful Democratic voice calling for the sort of transparency every American should want. I’d want to add that I thought of myself as a Republican in those days: Joe Biden’s decency and intelligence overwhelmed my partisan skepticism. I’ve always liked him.

Biden hardly is a perfect person or a perfect politician. He has been among the most gaffe-prone figures in Washington for over forty years. His tendency to say the wrong thing is not new. It got him in trouble with the Obama Administration in 2012 when he opened his mouth and got out ahead of the Administration on gay marriage. He spent early months of the Obama presidency in a “penalty box”—Obama staffers knew they needed him but didn’t trust him. Some still don’t.

But the facts speak for themselves. In four years, Joe Biden accomplished things that Barack Obama didn’t. In fact, he’s accomplished things few presidents have.

Start with major legislation. In recent decades, even two-term presidents are fortunate to have one signature piece of major legislation they can claim. Trump had the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Obama had the Affordable Care Act. Bush had No Child Left Behind. Every presidency, by now, is more or less shortened into its first two years. All those others were passed in the first two years of a presidency, and then major legislation stalled for each of them.

Major legislation the Biden Administration can claim from its first two years includes—

• the American Rescue Plan Act

• the Inflation Reduction Act

• the Respect for Marriage Act

• the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act

• the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (the first major gun legislation in 30 years)

• the Honoring our PACT Act

• the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

• the CHIPS and Science Act

That’s an astonishing record of legislative accomplishments that exceeds anything we’ve seen since LBJ. Biden achieved it in this highly polarized time with a narrow House majority and a Senate under Republican control. Each of those is a law that improves American lives. This is what government is for, and Joe Biden has not gotten enough credit for managing government so masterfully.

(By the way—let me include one more piece of legislation that came during the second half of the Biden Administration. Less than a year ago, the Biden Administration achieved the first comprehensive immigration reform since 1986. The bill would have provided new border security funding, fixed the asylum process, and created a path to citizenship for many already here and working with clean records. The votes were there, both parties agreed…until Donald Trump ordered the bill to be scuttled.)

You want more?

Presidents get too much credit for their economic records. Some of the real work is done by the Fed and by Congress. Most of the work is done by consumers, producers, and investors. But a president absolutely can mess the economy up by (choosing random examples) starting trade wars and deporting millions of workers. So let’s at least mention that inflation has been tamed (it cannot be reversed without bigger economic problems), there have been four years of uninterrupted monthly job growth, and we’ve had a lengthy period of low (<4%) unemployment.

It’s often said that those macro-level figures don’t reflect the experiences of U.S. voters who are suffering from high prices and other economic pressures. All true. But also, these judgments need to be made in relative terms. The U.S. postpandemic economic recovery has been “The Envy of the World.” Our economic situation may not be the most desirable one we can imagine, but the Biden Administration can take credit (some of those laws I mentioned above, and other things) for a postpandemic turnaround that went better than we otherwise would have felt entitled to expect.

The plain fact is that no four years of anyone’s presidency can undo entirely what has happened to American workers and households across the last forty years. Still, another plain fact is that after forty years of falling manufacturing employment the Biden Administration returned the United States to a thoughtful industrial policy that created more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs in just four years. That is the first net growth in manufacturing jobs under any presidential administration since the 1970s.

All of this is true. In addition, we can mention strengthening NATO and standing up to Russia, as well as a 2023 seven-day cease fire in the Israel-Palestine war before what may be a more durable cease fire negotiated in the last days of the Biden Administration.

On every view we can take except public opinion, the Biden Administration has met every challenge of the last four years with boldness, determination, and success. And here is the problem.

Journalists and scholars are beginning to tell us that the Biden Administration’s “deliverism” strategy was the point of political failure. Deliverism presumes that a politician’s record of delivering results will motivate voters. Speaking as a political scientist myself, deliverism sounds a lot like what democracy is supposed to be. But we seem to have entered a period when voters want something else in exchange for their votes—entertainment, perhaps, or just a feeling of having thumped our chests. Maybe George Washington had it right—a “spirit of party” that really is a “spirit of revenge”: “I am your retribution.”

The end of deliverism, I think we can say, augurs the end of politics under our Constitution as we always have known it. We are entering something new. As we enter it, we should pause at least to note and sound some gratitude for a president who delivered—absolutely delivered. Even if the American people weren’t interested.

I wrote last summer about the advantages of having a president with fifty years of experience in the federal government. The results speak for themselves and, whatever the American people’s judgment has been, those of us who pay attention to understand politics and government see this has been a remarkable presidency, a great success and a fitting end to a lifetime of public service.

Thank you, Joe Biden. A grateful nation should say so, but I do. Others do too. Well done, good and faithful servant.