Joe Biden’s long farewell.
On Wednesday night, President Joe Biden will deliver a prime-time address to the nation designed to “cement his legacy,” according to the New York Times. Shortly after Biden concludes his address, MSNBC will air Biden’s “final interview as president,” which he gave to network host Lawrence O’Donnell.
Biden will surely provide us with a lot of material to parse, but it’s unlikely that much of what we hear tonight will be new. Given the coordinated effort to usher the president off the political stage with fanfare and adulation, it’s easy to forget that he has been on a farewell tour for weeks.
In a solicitous appeal to the progressive Left, Biden delivered a speech in mid-December aimed at convincing critics of his tenure to put their grievances aside. In that speech, the outgoing president touted his legacy achievements at home and abroad. “The new administration’s going to inherit a very strong economy, at least at the moment,” he said in his address to the Brookings Institution.
The exit speech was timed in coordination with the release of an exit op-ed bylined by the president in which he admonished his critics for expecting the president to deliver results in the space of just four short years. It will “take years to see the full effects” of his policies, the op-ed sneered. Brand new infrastructure and broadband internet, a fully realized domestic semiconductor industry, and a shockingly competent Internal Revenue Service are on their way. We just have to remember to give our thanks to Biden whenever those plans achieve fruition.
Apparently unsatisfied with the reaction to these exit speeches and op-eds, Biden delivered another one late last week to an audience at the State Department. “Compared to four years ago, America is stronger. Our alliances are stronger. Our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We have not gone to war to make these things happen,” Biden crowed. “During my presidency, I’ve increased America’s power in every dimension.”
Fortunately, the exit interviews, speeches, and essays will not continue until morale improves. The Constitution is set to intervene, ushering Biden reluctantly out of public life. But all these redundant farewells would not be necessary if the message the president was promulgating had ever encountered a receptive audience. Biden can deliver all the self-congratulatory speeches he likes in his effort to craft a legacy narrative for himself. But with more than six in ten Americans inclined to deem Biden’s presidency a failure, he’s going to find that the story he’s pitching has few takers.
And yet, maybe the audience for all this isn’t the broader American public. Perhaps he’s talking to the community of highly partisan “historians” who he thinks will craft the record of his presidency for posterity. If so, Biden’s presidency will end as it began, with undue faith in judgment and influence wielded by the flatterers with whom he surrounded himself and who so misled him. That would be a fitting dénouement for a presidency brought low by the immeasurable vanity of its chief executive.