This wasn’t how Joe Biden planned to end his career. He wanted to be president for his entire adult life, clearly loved having the job and hoped desperately to hold on to it for another four years. But Biden can take comfort in this: He may be America’s best one-term president ever.
For progressives like me, Biden’s tenure has been a pleasant surprise. For nearly 50 years before reaching the Oval Office, Biden positioned himself as a moderate within the Democratic Party. Many liberals rightly looked askance at the less admirable parts of his long record in the Senate, such as his tight relationship with the credit card industry and his mishandling of Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings. We feared that his commitment to conciliation and procedural norms was ill-suited to facing down an increasingly radical Republican Party. But again and again, Biden exceeded expectations.
Biden had essentially no margin for error in Congress from the start.
It’s important to remember how unlikely some of the president’s victories were, especially when it came to passing new laws. During the 2020 election, Biden argued that his decades as vice president and senator made him uniquely capable of getting meaningful legislation passed by his former colleagues.
But there was reason to be skeptical of what he could accomplish in Congress. He has faced a Republican opposition increasingly judged not by what it achieves but by how venomously it fights Democratic presidents. While Barack Obama began his administration with huge congressional majorities — including, briefly, a filibuster-proof 60-vote bloc in the Senate — Biden had essentially no margin for error in either chamber from the start. Add in some troublemaking Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and it was reasonable to expect Biden would struggle to accomplish anything.
Yet he did accomplish plenty. The enormous American Rescue Plan helped carry the country through the terrible economic effects of the Covid pandemic. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was the first meaningful gun safety legislation in decades. The bipartisan infrastructure law — something Donald Trump never got passed in four years despite years of promises — and the CHIPS and Science Act represent extraordinary investments in American industrial capacity. And his industrial policy was a key break with the neoliberal approach of the past. Instead, the Biden administration aggressively intervened in the economy to promote new manufacturing, especially in areas that have experienced tough times in recent years.
The results speak for themselves. Whether you want to give any president credit for job creation that happens under his watch, Biden’s record in that area is unmatched in any presidential term in history. There are nearly 16 million more jobs today than when Biden took office. Under Donald Trump, less than 7 million jobs were created before the pandemic tore through the country, during what Trump absurdly claims was the greatest economy in human history.
The Biden legislation that may have the most significant long-term impact, though, is the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate via Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote after an excruciatingly long and complex process. The IRA had many components, but most importantly, it’s the most significant climate change legislation ever enacted. The IRA promotes clean energy production across a variety of economic sectors and geographic areas, offers subsidies for electric vehicles and reduces carbon emissions in multiple ways.
Unfortunately, most voters know next to nothing about the IRA or Biden’s aggressive executive actions on climate. As Robinson Meyer of the climate news site Heatmap (where I am also a columnist) wrote of Biden, “Again and again, he would pull off some difficult domestic policy — and then fail to communicate it to voters.” That’s meaningful — part of the president’s job is to bring the public along with what he’s doing — but it doesn’t change the impact of Biden’s practical accomplishments.
Biden took governing seriously. He showed that knowledge of how Washington works does, in fact, matter a great deal.
There are many other parts of Biden’s legacy to praise. He brought long-needed diversity to the federal judiciary, appointing unprecedented numbers of female and nonwhite judges. After four years of Trump’s praising dictators and demeaning U.S. allies, Biden restored a foreign policy consistent with both security and American values. He was the first president to join a union picket line, and his administration was consistently, strongly pro-labor. And despite unceasing Republican efforts to obscure Trump’s almost infinite corruption, his administration has been remarkably free of scandal.
That isn’t to say that Biden hasn’t made mistakes; every president does. There are decisions he made that I disagreed with. He hasn’t done nearly enough to restrain the Netanyahu government in its disastrous war on Gaza. He could have moved more aggressively to expand access to health care and retain the Covid-era expansion of the child tax credit. And I wish he had embraced Supreme Court reform years ago, not just before he dropped out of the 2024 campaign.
But in the big picture of Biden’s term, two takeaways stand out. First, he displayed a remarkable and admirable adaptability for someone who has been in politics for half a century, adjusting to changes not just in his party but in the world. How many young people would have said a politician in his 80s would do more on climate than any president before him?
Second, Biden took governing seriously. He showed that knowledge of how Washington works does, in fact, matter a great deal. When Biden claimed that his long experience would make him better suited to handle the complexities of the legislative process and the sprawling executive branch, some scoffed. Yet he was right.
In the end, age came for the president, as it comes for us all. In Biden’s case, it left him unable to fight off Trump a second time. But he was a better president than almost anyone expected.
