By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-06 19:46:32 | Updated at 2025-01-08 02:44:42
1 day ago
Column: Biden’s legacy, like Jimmy Carter’s, is complex — and it’s in Donald Trump’s hands now
Los Angeles Times ^ | Jan. 6, 2025 3 AM PT | Doyle McManus
Posted on 01/06/2025 11:45:55 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
- President Biden said he couldn’t sit back and let Trump have eight years in the White House. He failed.
- But in his one term, Biden achieved an impressive record of economic legislation.
- As the death of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidents seen as failures on the way out can be reassessed more generously decades later. How will Biden’s legacy fare?
WASHINGTON — By the standard President Biden set himself, the core purpose he proclaimed when he ran in 2020, it is impossible to assess his one-term presidency as anything but a failure.
“We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said as he began his campaign in 2019. “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Now Trump has a chance to do precisely what Biden wanted to prevent — to complete eight years in the White House and put his stamp on American politics for decades to come. And there will be little Biden can do beyond stand by and watch.
Biden’s insistence on running for a second term at the age of 81 despite voters’ doubts that he was up to the job, and his disastrous debate performance in June, threw his party into a three-week-long crisis. By the time he dropped out of the race in July, it was too late to stage an orderly competition among potential successors; his vice president, Kamala Harris, had only 103 days to campaign.
But there was far more to Biden’s four years in office than his physical decline and his monumental blunder in trying to run.
The death of former President Carter serves as a reminder that presidents who...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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