Joe Biden always wanted to be president. He just never knew why.
A president who lacked strong priorities or firm beliefs took the White House in 2021 atop a party dominated by group politics. The groups knew what they wanted and knew what they believed, but of course, the various groups — racial, gender, gay, labor, et cetera — had diverging and even competing demands.
The result was a failed presidency.
Biden ran as the sensible, pragmatic moderate who promised a return to normalcy after the exhausting abnormality of then-President Donald Trump and the disastrous abnormality of the pandemic lockdowns. His decades of service in Washington meant he would be capable.
But because he let groups steer the ship, he abandoned moderation for ideological projects, and technocratic competence gave way to undisciplined giveaways to the party’s constituent special-interest groups.
Biden for Biden
If you studied Biden’s 3 1/2 decades in the Senate and his eight years as former President Barack Obama’s vice president, you would never be able to discern a clear set of beliefs.
Biden, a onetime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was often a hawk, sometimes a dove, often in between, and always opinionated. He opposed the Vietnam War and then supported our wars in Grenada, Panama, and the Balkans. Yet he opposed the Gulf War before supporting it. He later criticized former President George H.W. Bush for not going further and deposing Saddam Hussein.
In 2002, Biden was one of the most ardent supporters of a regime-change war in Iraq. He supported it for a couple of years, but by 2005, he opposed the war. Later, he claimed, “Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war, at that moment.”
You’d find a similarly rudderless path if you tracked Biden on other issues: abortion, the death penalty, taxes, spending, executive authority, China, and plenty of others.
It’s not unusual for a politician to be something of a windsock — to blow with the prevailing winds and to lack any core beliefs. But Biden’s flexibility was extraordinary, as was his persistence in running for president.
Biden famously dropped out of the 1988 presidential race when his plagiarism was made public. He had eyed presidential runs in 1980 and 1984 (in 1984, he filled out the paperwork but never submitted it). In 2004, he again considered running but deferred to 2008. The 2020 cycle, then, was his sixth time eyeing the office. If you count only his 1988, 2008, and 2020 runs, Biden still ran in a majority of the presidential contests in the past 40 years that didn’t have an incumbent running.
But what was he running on? It’s not clear. In 1988, he ran against capitalistic materialism and failing schools. His 2008 campaign centered on his approval of the PATRIOT Act.
In 2020, it was even vaguer. Biden was running to restore “the soul of the nation,” he said.
The false promise of normalcy
In the tumultuous times of 2020, Biden’s lack of beliefs was a political asset. The average Democrat was not “feeling the Bern” of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) socialist revolution. Normal voters were tired of their president constantly making a spectacle of himself, and Democratic primary voters were desperate to unseat Trump.
Biden seemed the man for the moment because he was nonideological. He had been vice president for eight years and had been in Washington for five decades. He promised commonsense competence.
Biden obviously did not deliver commonsense competence.
Biden and the Democratic Congress grossly overspent, driving the worst inflation in generations. He effectively opened our borders, creating a massive border crisis and flooding many cities with more undocumented immigrants than they could absorb. His administration was a ruthless aggressor in culture wars, advancing gender ideology in schools with executive orders and persecuting pro-lifers.
These were the roots of the Democrats’ downfall in 2024. Inflation and the border were the biggest negatives for the Biden-Harris administration and for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. Perhaps the most effective attack ad on Harris focused on extreme stances on transgendered matters.
Commentators also note that the Biden administration didn’t deliver on many of its promises. It promised us a network of electric-car chargers and free rural broadband. Basically, none of it was built after four years of Biden-Harris.
Biden’s incompetence and ideological extremism cost his party the White House. So, why did he end up governing so differently from what he promised?
Biden, captured
The root problem was this: A president without a strong set of beliefs or priorities is apt to be steered by special-interest groups. The Democratic Party of the 2020s is a party dominated more than normal by special-interest groups.
The group dominance makes sense, given the shape of modern progressivism. Group membership is everything in a worldview that sees the oppressor-oppressed dynamic as the most important consideration in politics. The convention showed how the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, et cetera, is central to today’s Democratic Party.
Biden’s inflation-fueling overspending was a direct result of the special-interest feeding frenzy. Beyond the normal array of subsidy-suckling corporate lobbyists seeking federal handouts, Biden’s early spending spree was a free-for-all among Democratic lawmakers, as were his failed legislative efforts.
“From the design of the American Rescue Plan at the beginning of his term, through Build Back Better and the rocky implementation of the measures he was able to pass,” writes liberal analyst Dylan Matthews at Vox, “Biden’s domestic record is characterized by a refusal to prioritize, a paralyzing fear of pissing off any Democratic faction that too often wound up winning nothing for any of them.”
A president with beliefs or priorities and who could say no to special interests would have set spending priorities in his 2021 COVID-19 recovery spending spree. But Biden refused to prioritize, so the package grew and grew.
Then, Biden tried to do it again with a bill he called “Build Back Better.” As Matthews writes, “Like the American Rescue Plan, BBB was less a coherent agenda than a hodgepodge of different priorities with their own congressional champions.”
Build Back Better grew so big that moderates Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin opposed it, sinking the bill. Why didn’t Biden try to focus the bill on what mattered most? Matthews says that Biden concluded, “Trying to do one thing well was a trap, because someone would still be mad at him for not doing their thing.”
The money that did go out the door was saddled with more special-interest pleadings. Companies getting money from the CHIPS and Science Act were forced to provide free child care for all employees — this feeds the equity-feminist bloc of the party and the teachers unions that want to expand their K-12 monopoly to include children under 5.
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Likewise, the border crisis was partly driven by Biden’s lack of conviction. The people who cared most about immigration in the Democratic Party were ideologues who wanted open borders. Maybe the White House believed these groups spoke for all American immigrants or all Hispanics. For whatever reason, Biden gave them what they wanted.
It’s a wry trope that simply wanting to be president should disqualify a person from the presidency. It’s much more true when that person could never tell you why he wants to be president.