Joe Biden's legacy: economically strong, politically disastrous

There goes Joe Biden's legacy, said Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. Had Kamala Harris won last week's election, the president might have been remembered for some of his achievements in office. As it is, he'll now just be known as the man who beat Donald Trump, and then let him straight back into the White House through his own stubborn refusal to cede power.

It was clear long before this year that Biden was too old to stand for re-election. Yet having originally presented himself as a transition candidate, he decided to run again anyway, only pulling out in July after his disastrous debate performance. Biden should have resigned a year ago, said Holman W. Jenkins Jr in The Wall Street Journal. Harris could then have been tested as a president, and in a proper Democratic primary. Republican voters might have "taken the cue that Mr Trump's era was over too".

It was Biden's agenda that really messed things up for the Democrats, said Isaac Schorr in the New York Post. One of the main reasons he beat Trump in 2020 was because he "offered the American people some semblance of normalcy". He promised to govern from the centre as a benign moderate. Yet once in power, he suddenly thought he could be Franklin D. Roosevelt. He started governing "as if he were president of some far-left campus club", relaxing controls on the borders and pushing through a series of massive spending bills that exacerbated the inflation problem.

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The president hoped to solve three problems at once with his multibillion-dollar climate and infrastructure spending bills, said Kate Aronoff in The New Republic. He wanted to revive America's industrial heartland, challenge China's dominance in clean energy, and win back disaffected working-class voters. In economic terms, the approach has reaped dividends: America is today enjoying a manufacturing boom and low unemployment. But politically, "Bidenomics" has proved a complete dud. It hasn't alleviated the cost-of-living crisis, and it isn't helping the Democrats win elections.

The cruel irony, said Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, is that these long-term investments, which have provided the foundations for economic growth, will probably start paying off politically under Trump, who opposed the legislation. "Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor."