Is President Biden more of a Jimmy Carter or a James Buchanan? It may be years before Biden’s legacy is truly understood, but that didn’t stop the “Matter of Opinion” hosts from debating how his time in office will be remembered.
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Michelle Cottle: OK, welcome back, everyone. It’s officially our first “Matter of Opinion” episode of 2025. Today, I want us to talk about President Biden’s legacy. He’s got just about a week and change left in office, and more than that, he’s ending a five-decade-long run in public service.
So before he goes and the Trump moving vans roll down Pennsylvania Avenue, I want us to look at the whole of Biden’s legacy, including the 2024 election but also going beyond it. How does it look now? And what might it look like down the road with more hindsight?
So to kick this all off, I’m wondering if we can talk about this legacy outside of the 2024 election.
Ross, do you have a thought on this?
Douthat: Well, since you guys are probably expecting me to argue for the Biden administration as an epic disaster, no matter what angle you take on it, I think I should try and sketch out a narrative in which Biden’s reputation is moderately redeemed by history.
I think if you wanted to tell a story of Biden’s redemption, you would argue, first, that his administration had a number of serious legislative accomplishments that sought the reindustrialization and rebuilding of the technological production base in American life — the CHIPS Act, most notably, combined with big-ticket efforts to push technological solutions to climate change.
So I think you can imagine spinning forward a story where over the next 20 or 25 years, climate change and competition with China both loom extremely large and people interested in rehabilitating Biden’s reputation argue that he put America on a good track in both of those areas and that he did more in terms of infrastructure spending than Donald Trump ever did in his first term. That is a really important part of his legacy.
And even though the withdrawal from Afghanistan in its execution was disastrous, it was actually clearly the right thing to do. Something that other presidents — Barack Obama and Trump — had wanted to do and hadn’t been able to do. Biden yanked the Band-Aid off. And then you would attach to that a defense of how the Biden administration has handled the war in Ukraine. Anyway, I’ll stop there, but that’s an attempt to sort of run through a pro-Biden interpretation of what his administration accomplished, notwithstanding how it ended and other factors that we can get into, where I do have some negative views.
Cottle: Those, I’m sure, we’ll get to.
Douthat: Yeah, they’ll come out.
Cottle: Just a few. Carlos?
Lozada: You know, you asked: Is it possible to consider Biden’s legacy without focusing on the 2024 election? The answer to that is no. It’s not possible to assess the Biden presidency without looking at his decision making during the campaign. His decision to run for re-election, even his delay in withdrawing from the race, has had far-reaching consequences — for the party, for the election, for the country.
But I think it is possible to assess and evaluate his presidency beyond that decision. It’s our job to look at the totality of what a president has accomplished.
There was a Gallup poll published just this week asking how Biden will be judged by history. And in the poll you could select that he will be judged to be a “poor,” “below average,” “average,” “above average” or “outstanding” president. Fifty-four percent said that it would be either “below average” or “poor.” And about 45 percent picked “average,” “above average” or “outstanding.” To me, that says that there were significant accomplishments overshadowed by some major failings, even apart from whatever happened in 2024.
He helped the U.S. economy recover from Covid. He set in motion some long-term transformations — which Ross alluded to — that could set the U.S. economy on a firmer footing but at the same time presided over debilitating inflation due, in part, to some of those policies. He helped pull NATO together in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without getting us into a direct possible nuclear war with the Russians, and yet the world seemed to still kind of explode under his watch. His progress on the border came far too late for it to matter politically or far too late to make a convincing case that it mattered to him more than politically.
So even when you set aside 2024 and the campaign, I think of this as, at best, a partial credit legacy.
Cottle: That feels right. It feels like something that was deeply damaged. It started off with him pledging to do a little bipartisan work in the Senate — he liked the wheeling and dealing and the collegiality and clubbiness of it.
And he felt like he had a good handle on how to deal with the legislative branch as the president. And sure enough, he came in and was a very productive president for the first couple of years. He may not have done everything everybody wanted him to do, but by God, he made Infrastructure Week a reality, dug us out of Covid — climate change policy, the CHIPS Act. But it was a little bit Shakespearean in that he had a kind of tragic, fatal flaw, and that was his pride.
He thought he was the only guy who could beat Trump again and keep the nation on a certain track, and that wound up tanking his legacy, at least temporarily.
Carlos: Ross?
Douthat: I think — again, trying to stick with the framework — when I look back over the things I myself wrote about Biden throughout his presidency — again, as someone who had plenty of fundamental disagreements with his administration — I do think that there were a bunch of moments when I found myself understanding and defending moves the administration made that, in the end, look unsuccessful in hindsight.
So one key example would be with the war in Ukraine. I think that the Biden administration was correct to rush arms and support to the Ukrainians once it became clear that they could, in fact, stand up to the Russians with support. They were correct to support Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the initial one that went quite well, and then there was this point where things were going Ukraine’s way, and I think, in hindsight, that was actually clearly the moment when the administration should have made a big push for a negotiated settlement But instead, the administration ended up supporting a further attempt at another Ukrainian counteroffensive to regain more territory.
That counteroffensive stalled out, ultimately failed, gave Russia an advantage that it retains to this day that has made the prospect of negotiated settlement worse for Ukraine than it would have been.
I think that mistake looms large, in terms of assessing Biden’s foreign policy record and how he handled the Ukraine war. But I didn’t write a column at that particular moment saying, “You know, now is the time to negotiate.” I was saying, “Well, you need to negotiate, but it’s probably OK to give Ukraine another season of attempted counteroffensive.”
So that’s an example where, in hindsight, there was a big missed opportunity by the Biden administration, but I’m not going to claim that I identified it. And wartime foreign policy is, in fact, extremely difficult.
Cottle: Yeah, that’s been one of the more interesting developments of the Biden administration for me, which is that a lot of what he has been most harshly criticized about has been his handling of foreign policy. And we’re talking about a guy who — this was his selling point, right? I mean, in the Senate, he was known for being a foreign policy expert. A lot of presidents come into the job with zero foreign policy.
Douthat: “Expert” is a strong — I mean, there were lots of people who thought that Biden was terrible at foreign policy.
Cottle: Yes.
Douthat: The former secretary of defense Robert Gates said he had been wrong about most issues —
Cottle: You can disagree with him —
Douthat: Anyway, but yes, he had foreign policy experience.
Cottle: But this was, for the general public, supposedly, one of his selling points. Not that the general public really gives a crap about foreign policy, for the most part, unless we’ve got troops on the ground. But he was more experienced in this area than the vast majority of presidents.
Lozada: If we’re on the foreign policy digression here, let me just say one thing about Afghanistan. The administration has gotten a lot of deserved grief over the Afghanistan withdrawal, how chaotic the whole thing was.
But I really think, to be fair, we have to acknowledge that the American screw-up in Afghanistan has many, many fathers, has widely shared responsibility, and it is unfair for it all to fall on the shoulders of the guy who finally pulled the plug.
Cottle: Yeah, but that’s what you do as president. The execution matters, and you take the hit if it doesn’t go well.
Lozada: Yes, and that’s always the easy way for people to be like, “Well, I agree with the idea, but it’s really the execution.” You can attach that to any policy outcome that you want to criticize but not really criticize too harshly. The U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan was a decades-long undertaking. The U.S. abandoned Afghanistan after it stopped being a Cold War proxy fight against the Soviets. George W. Bush diverted resources from Afghanistan for his war of choice in Iraq. Administrations of both parties lied about the supposed progress that was being made. There’s a very damning book called “The Afghanistan Papers” by Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post. It’s all there. No one wanted to end the war because they all knew what a disaster it would be when they did so.
And so when Biden ripped the Band-Aid off, as Ross said, the wound was always going to be festering and ugly. He still gets blamed for it. That’s fine. That’s how the world works. That’s how presidents are assessed. But to suggest that the U.S. failings of Afghanistan are his alone is to ignore the entire war on terrorism.
Cottle: OK, but before we go down this particular rabbit hole too much, he had many other failures that voters were more concerned about than just Afghanistan. And I think immigration was a huge one. And then, of course, the economy is just complicated, and we’d have to dig into that for six shows on its own.
Douthat: Right, I think people will be litigating the inflation debate for a long time. I think the immigration debate is a bit simpler, and it’s an example of something that goes back, really, to Biden’s campaign, where one of the odd things about Biden’s campaign for the presidency was that he clearly won the Democratic nomination as the more moderate alternative in a party that was otherwise swinging to the left.
And then having won the nomination, he himself decided — for the sake of party unity, because of the climate at the time, because there weren’t a lot of Biden loyalists to staff an administration — he himself pivoted to the left in terms of personnel and policy on social issues, especially. That was a big contributor to the moves his administration made on the border. I think if I were telling a story about Biden’s failures, I would say the promise of Biden was that he would be the moderate elder statesman presiding over and tempering the more progressive left-wing inclinations of his party.
Instead, he didn’t do that. He did not really ever triangulate against his own base. He never tried to be Bill Clinton or Joe Biden of the 1990s, especially on social issues, especially on immigration. And again, I don’t think we can litigate why that was without getting into his age and decline.
But I think that is also a reasonable story to tell — that the Joe Biden of 1997 or even 2007, I think, would have done a better job of saying to his party’s activists, “OK, we’re not doing everything you want on the border because it’s going to blow up in our face.” And the Joe Biden of 2020 did not do that.
Cottle: I think that could be said of the whole Democratic Party — that it has shifted that direction and he was following the party. I mean, the Senate’s approach to this, not that many years ago among the Democrats, would never have flown in recent years. It’s just like the whole party’s moved that direction. Or did.
Douthat: Right, but if you have that kind of dynamic in your party, in theory, putting someone with a long record of self-conscious moderation and a memory of the days when Democrats struggled because of social issues, having him in charge should have been helpful. I wrote — when The Times asked people to write endorsements for Democratic candidates in the 2020 primaries, I ended up writing the pro-Joe Biden piece. But that was part of my thinking, that it would make sense for the Democrats to have as their standard-bearer someone who remembered the days before the progressive base took over. But you just didn’t see that from Biden in office.
Lozada: Yeah, I mean, part of what’s interesting to me about the immigration and inflation debates is just how Biden and the Democrats spoke to the public about this. This week USA Today had a long sort of legacy interview with Joe Biden that Susan Page conducted. And he said that his biggest regret was that he didn’t effectively counter Donald Trump’s misinformation.
And that’s part of a longstanding and, I think, fine critique of the Trump presidency. Like, Trump has lied compulsively, not least about the results of elections. But you can believe that and still realize that there are significant things that the Biden team and Biden himself said and promoted and argued that just did not match up with — call it the lived experience of American voters. And one of those was that inflation is transitory: It’s not a big deal, don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine. The border situation: It’s a challenge, it’s not a crisis, not as bad as it seems.
And it was far too late by the time they realized that no one was buying that because it wasn’t true. And I mean, you can add the “Biden not being too old for the presidency,” you know, and “Biden’s never going to pardon Hunter,” etc., etc. But just to stick to immigration and inflation, those were two things where — forget what he was doing — what he was saying just didn’t match up with the reality that American voters saw.
Cottle: So with all that, was his presidency a failure? A tragedy? Carlos, what’s your general ruling?
Lozada: In the long term, I wouldn’t say this was a failed presidency or a tragedy. More than that, I think it was just miscast. Biden wanted to be president for so long, and he failed at that so many times. He was always more a creature of the Senate than of the White House.
He struggled to articulate why he wanted to become president. When he finally got it, it was not because the party or the country had fallen in love with him. The country was hoping that Biden could bring some sort of normalcy, contrasting to the pandemic-era Trump administration. So he pitched himself as a transitional figure but then wanted to become a transformative figure. And that ambition torpedoed him and the party in 2024.
Frank Foer’s book on Biden, called “The Last Politician.” He said that Biden developed a heroic self-conception. He pitched both 2020 and 2024 as these battles for democracy. And I think he was correct on the substance but not on the politics.It wasn’t what people were grasping for at the time. Even his campaign pollster once said, “No one knows what this ‘soul of America’ [expletive] means.” And I think that compulsion to become president at all costs, to be a transformative one, not a transitional one, and then to want to hold on to it, because that’s what presidents want, ended up being the reasons that I see him as a miscast for the role.
Cottle: I want your thoughts on how Biden compares to other one-term presidents. George H.W. Bush or Carlos’s presidential obsession, the dearly departed Jimmy Carter, who, as it happens, has been lying in state this week here in Washington.
Carlos, why don’t you start us off? Is there anything in particular that stands out for you in this department?
Lozada: I think it’s probably easiest to compare Carter and Biden. Both grappled with high inflation, foreign crises that they struggled to resolve. One irony is that Biden’s been around so long that in one of his memoirs, he writes about how he considered challenging Carter for the nomination in 1980 when he was a young senator.
But this is actually very telling. He writes, “I knew we Democrats were in trouble. Everything Carter touched seemed to turn to dust in his hands.” And he concluded that Carter was — quote — “a man of decency and a man of principle, but that wasn’t enough.”
I don’t know — that doesn’t sound too distant from what one might say about Biden himself.
Cottle: God has an ironic sense of humor.
Lozada: In any case, what’s interesting to me when you start comparing presidents and legacies — and even just these one-term ones — is that these legacies really evolve over time. George H.W. Bush went from being the out-of-touch patrician who didn’t understand grocery scanners into a model for vital but prudent foreign policy.
Carter, the one president no Democrat ever wanted to be compared to — we’ve seen in recent days how there are revisionist retrospectives, on human rights and his impact on the judiciary. Gerald Ford, who we don’t think about in this context very much because he didn’t even serve a full term, received so much criticism for his pardon of Richard Nixon, which, for many, has been revised into an act of patriotism. Something the country needed to move on.
So right now it’s hard to see the Biden legacy beyond the immediate events of 2024. Eventually we will. I don’t know what direction the legacy will move in, but I’m very confident that it’s going to change.
Douthat: Well, I think we can’t assess it decisively, but I do really think the options are bad and worse for Biden, especially relative to a figure like Carter. There’s some overlap between the two men: things Carter did that ended up having a big impact after his presidency, failures or sort of perceived weakness in foreign policy.
But there’s no Carter equivalent of Biden’s being too old for office from the beginning, having that effectively covered up and papered over by his staff, deciding through whatever process to run for re-election, despite everyone around him having to know that this was a bad idea, and then having that lead his party into a disaster that was a sort of unparalleled cluster-bleep for the Democrats.
My expectation is that there are two scenarios. In Scenario A, Donald Trump’s second term is either similar to his first term or perceived as more successful. And in that world, Biden will be regarded as this kind of semi-senile embodiment of a failing liberalism that ultimately couldn’t reckon with Donald Trump’s transformative populism. That’s not a good judgment.
In Scenario B, Donald Trump is an authoritarian nightmare, the likes of which some people expect. In that scenario, Joe Biden is the semi-senile guy who failed to stop an authoritarian nightmare from coming to America. So in Scenario A he’s a last figure of a failing consensus who then shuffles off the stage. That’s pretty bad. And in Scenario B he’s like James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce, the last presidents before a total disaster for America. So if Trump succeeds in any way, Biden looks quite bad, and if Trump is a nightmare, then Biden looks even worse.
Cottle: So you see no path for restoration. You agree, Carlos?
Lozada: I guess one thing, Ross, you’re making me think about is that — and we should acknowledge this upfront in any of these discussions of legacy — is that legacies are largely the result of what presidents do, the events that transpire during their terms. But they also, in part, result from — and I hate to say this — people like us, from journalists.
Douthat: Yes.
Lozada: Also from historians and intellectuals who write about them and weigh in on them and develop narratives about them. Presidents know this, which is why they’re always convening these ridiculous round tables of historians and big thinkers to help them think about their place in history.
So a lot of this discussion just feeds the kind of Meacham–Beschloss–Kearns Goodwin–Douthat–industrial complex, right?
Cottle: You’re part of the problem, Ross.
Douthat: Ah, to have Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book sales!
Lozada: We all dabble in that. And what you’re saying, Ross, is that the Biden legacy is going to be determined by whatever Trump does, not by what Biden did himself and that, either way, Biden was kind of wrong. If Trump is an authoritarian nightmare, which is exactly what Biden had been warning about all this time, even if the public didn’t buy that critique, then it’s all Biden’s fault because he let it happen by sort of staying too long.
If democracy emerges unscathed from Trump, Part 2 — meaning that Biden was entirely wrong about the Trump threat — then paradoxically, he’ll look better in the eyes of history. It’s a remarkable lesson in the paradoxes of politics and legacy.
When I think about the Biden legacy, for me, a big part of it is that instead of being the bridge that he said he was going to be to a new generation of Democratic leadership, he ended up being a bridge connecting two Trump presidencies. He’s an interregnum. He’s an in-between. Even the Biden presidency will always be subsumed as part of the Trump era. That’s how I think about it, more than “Was it terrible or just slightly, somewhat terrible?”
Biden failed to make a lasting mark in the era when he finally got the job he always wanted.
Cottle: So I want to take it in just a slightly different direction, as Biden is a cautionary tale for this period we’re in anyway, when America just is graying more generally. But I do think, in a lot of voters’ minds, he came to represent a cultural moment in which you can’t root out some of these folks who have been around for so long and still think they should be running the joint and won’t let go.
I know that is not specifically a presidential legacy, but it is one of those things that I like to throw out there periodically because we still have a lot of political leaders who are doing this. And our current president is not a spring chicken and I see us potentially heading down that path as well.
Douthat: I’ll be slightly optimistic and say that the age issue turned out to be so catastrophic for Biden that it does maybe set us up for a world where people in both parties feel more comfortable easing people out, pushing people out when appropriate. I think the shadow of what happened with Biden will loom over both parties in ways that might help us escape gerontocracy faster than they otherwise would have.
Cottle: That would be great. That would be like a very broad upside.
Douthat: New Year, New Year’s optimism.
Cottle: So I’m thinking we’ll leave it there. It’s going to be a magical year. Everybody just buckle up. There will be much for us to talk about.
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