Biden’s farewell reminded us of every reason we can’t wait for him to just go away | Opinion
Say this much for Joe Biden’s farewell address to the nation Wednesday: It neatly reflected the failure and incoherence of his miserable four-year presidency.
Biden bragged of righting the economy after COVID, ignoring the body blow of inflation that, more than anything, cost Democrats in November. He didn’t mention the role that his over-stimulation through unwarranted federal spending played in spiking prices and, eventually, interest rates.
Biden warned that a “tech-industrial complex” threatens to take over the nation’s business. Apparently, that wasn’t a problem for the years that Silicon Valley lavished donations and attention on Democrats, including Biden. And his administration was perfectly happy to appeal to the “complex’s” power to try to shut down ordinary Americans who dared to disagree with government or expert health recommendations — or even to share a joking meme about them.
The president also lamented the supposedly sudden rise of billionaires, ignoring that the power of the rich vibrates through all of human history. Even if it’s ascendent now, Biden and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, have been in charge for 12 of the last 16 years — happily accepting billionaires’ donations to acquire and keep power.
Within the last couple of weeks, Biden honored one of those billionaires, George Soros, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Soros is a prolific Democratic donor and the driving force behind electing uber-liberal district attorneys whose decisions to scale back prosecutions have been a factor in the horrific big-city crimes that helped drive voters to Republicans.
We can’t expect a politician to lay out an even-handed evaluation of his own record. There is always an assumption of some nostalgia, some bond between the president and the people. Even the losers draw tens of millions of votes.
With Biden, though, there’s little connection left. That’s in part because we were sold a president who did not exist.
He was presented in 2020 as a 50-year sage of Washington, the antidote to the chaos of Donald Trump. He was the adult in the room, the defender of American norms, a moderating force and a decent, empathetic figure.
The adult? Tell that to the people of Afghanistan, once again subject to a brutal Taliban regime, but now one armed with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American equipment that Biden decided to leave behind. Biden rejected explicit warnings from the military because of a firm date he had in his head and the result was — chaos.
Defender of norms? The Supreme Court made it abundantly clear that Biden lacked the authority to transfer broad amounts of student debt from those who accrued it to American taxpayers. But to his final days in office, Biden kept exploiting loopholes to make as many plumbers and police officers pay the debts of elite-class professionals as possible.
Let’s not forget, too, that he pushed for a COVID vaccine mandate that the court roundly rejected. If you aren’t defending the Constitution’s separation of powers and limits on federal authority, you aren’t the “norms” guy.
Moderate? Perhaps in comparison to the rest of what his party offered in the 2020 campaign, which featured such a hard push to the left that senior Democrats panicked about losing to Trump and electro-shocked Biden’s campaign to life just in time. But the Biden administration rewarded the leftists in the end, particularly on social issues. Never forget that his government seriously tried to remove the words “mother” and “father” from federal statutes in service to gender concepts that most Americans reject.
But it was the decency lie that proved to be the biggest. Even in 2020, it didn’t really track with many who’ve followed Biden’s 874-year career in Washington. There are just too many stories of him being a jerk, thin-skinned and willing to brazenly lie about his record.
Let’s take one story from his presidency that never got enough attention. Biden brought to the White House a German shepherd, Commander, who turned out to be a menace. We learned in 2024 that Commander had a taste for human flesh, particularly from Secret Service agents. At least 24 suffered bites, and officials had to try to change their behavior to try to avoid antagonizing the man-eating beast.
No decent dog owner would allow that to continue. No decent president would greet with nonchalance the fact that his pet was endangering the very people who would, if necessary, take a bullet for him and his family.
Of greater consequence, of course, is Biden’s diminished cognitive ability. No decent president would cling to power and subject his party to another campaign. Once his decline could no longer be hidden, his party faced the choice of a sweeping loss or an ugly internal coup that left it with a candidate, Kamala Harris, who most Democrats knew couldn’t hack it.
That’s not so decent, is it?
Most Americans have processed Joe Biden’s term as a failed presidency. Nothing he said Wednesday night can change that verdict.
This story was originally published January 17, 2025 at 3:25 AM with the headline "Biden’s farewell reminded us of every reason we can’t wait for him to just go away | Opinion."
