“He ran two or three times, he never got above 1%,” Donald Trump said of Joe Biden in 2019. “And then Obama came along and took him off the trash heap, and he became the vice president.”
It was an amusing way to insult the former vice president at the time — perhaps less so after Biden went on to win the Democratic nomination, defeat Trump, and become president. Still, the characterization rang true insofar as Barack Obama’s choice of Biden as running mate in 2008 struck many people, justifiably, as an odd one.
By then, Biden had for several decades been a loquacious self-promoter whose temper and plagiarism seemed to have blown any shot at the presidency he ever had. It was strange therefore to watch him find his way into the unexpected role of junior partner in a political relationship with a man young enough to be his son.
By December 2008, Biden had accepted that Obama, after only four years in federal office, was more qualified for the presidency than he was. “We got this ticket in the right order,” he is said to have told senior adviser Ron Klain. But as Obama’s No. 2, Biden was not always a good fit. Jonathan Alter wrote in The Promise (2010) that Obama “was surprised and angry when his vice-presidential candidate seemed to say something stupid every few days.” As his administration came together, Obama increasingly regarded Biden as “a filterless chatterbox” and suspected him or his aides of most of the leaks about his Cabinet picks. Alter relates that Biden was deliberately excluded from “many important conversations about personnel” as a consequence.
Of Biden’s participation in meetings about Afghanistan, Alter cited an unidentified aide as stating that if Biden had been president, “heads [in the Pentagon] would have rolled and we would have had a different policy. But no one would have been able to figure out what the policy was” — a fateful comment, perhaps.
According to the officially sanctioned narrative, Obama’s relationship with Biden improved significantly over time. Nevertheless, Obama’s most famous recent comments about Biden, relayed to Politico by anonymous Democrats, have been distinctly uncomplimentary.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” Obama said. While boasting during the 2020 election cycle about his own close personal connection with Iowa voters, Obama supposedly told a 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
Obama’s political staff at times viewed Biden as an impediment, and it wasn’t just because of his habitual blunders. In 2012, Obama’s staff weighed the pros and cons of booting the incumbent vice president from the ticket, going so far as to test it in some polls and focus groups. They decided it “wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” according to the 2012 campaign book Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.
Those two authors also wrote of a striking incident in which Biden was caught wooing Democratic donors in California for a 2016 run during Obama’s 2012 reelection effort. This was a very clumsy act of self-promotion at his boss’s expense. When he got wind of it, White House senior adviser David Plouffe, who is six years younger than Obama, sat Biden down like he was a naughty schoolboy and scolded him for “talking about some future election” during Obama’s reelection race and “running bootleg meetings with donors.”
Biden apologized but, typically, later whined about the incident to his confidante, White House chief of staff Bill Daley. He had no idea, as Heilemann and Halperin would later report, that Daley had been the chief advocate for kicking him off the 2012 ticket.
All this blundering constitutes the case that left-wing Obamaworld makes against Biden’s presidency. Its denizens thought little of him as vice president. They saw him as indiscreet, not very competent, lacking Obama’s political touch, and untrustworthy. This view, combined with Biden’s challenges in office, has inspired zealous commentaries from some prominent Democrats, such as David Axelrod, about Biden stepping aside in favor of someone who can win in 2024 and govern effectively.
But the Obama camp has an unspoken case in favor of Biden, too, and it is a more interesting one. It is also one that Trump frequently articulates, both in speeches and with online memes mocking Biden’s age and lack of mental acuity. It is that Biden does not matter. He might have the title of president, but it is the young, radical aides from the Obama era who are really running the country in his name.
Setting aside any insinuations there about Biden’s sharpness, the analysis holds up pretty well that Obama holdovers, and therefore to some extent Obama himself, are running the show. Biden’s administration is so derivative of Obama’s that one could be forgiven for thinking the former president is still in charge.
Biden sought the presidency under highly unusual circumstances. His predecessors brought big controversial ideas to the table when running for the top office. Obama promised what is now Obamacare, along with an ambitious environmental program. George W. Bush ran on Social Security privatization and what is now Medicare Part D. Trump had his border wall against Mexico and his list of judicial appointments. One way or another, all three ran risks and stepped on third rails to get to the White House.
Biden, in contrast, had no big idea. To the extent that he even ran on anything identifiable in 2020, it was on a promise to rebuild a post-COVID-19 economy that was more than halfway rebuilt, especially in terms of employment, by the time he took office in January 2021. “Build Back Better” is a status quo slogan that most challengers for the presidency could never get away with.
But Biden had the luxury of offering a return to normalcy after the chaos of Trump. The idea of reversion or boring normalness was attractive to voters weary of mayhem. He was the unifying figure whose moderation had triumphed over Sen. Bernie Sanders’s socialism in the primaries. Many Republican voters felt they could at least take consolation in the fact that he seemed to be no wild-eyed radical. Old Joe would not drive the nation off the rails, they thought.
Biden has not lived up to this modest promise, but it isn’t because he is personally a reflexive extremist. He has, rather, become an empty vessel for all-inclusive Obama-era leftism, which keeps evolving into something ever more extreme.
If he is more than that, then what exactly is “Bidenism”? There are few leads. The closest thing he has to a signature legislative accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, which was just a reactive response to public anger over the economy in the 2022 midterm election year. And “Bidenomics” was always more a campaign slogan than a coherent set of ideas. Nowadays, it is more likely to inspire ironic grins than serious policy debates.
No, the fingerprints on Biden’s policies are not his own. They are those of Obama. There is no evidence that Obama is secretly pulling the strings from his home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C., nor of any grand bargain between the two men, as the one Gerald Ford tried to impose on Ronald Reagan as a condition of becoming his running mate in 1980. Rather, Obama’s influence lives on in a presidency staffed with people he originally hired. Biden’s lack of original ideas has left all of those Obama alumni free to pursue the same goals they were working toward a decade ago.
What we get, consequently, is the restoration of Obamaism, but without the youth, energy, reasonable facade, articulacy, charisma, or coolness of the former president.
The one thing there is more of now, rather than less, is intensity. Administration officials now pursue their aims with greater ideological fervor, realizing that they can get away with a lot more now than they could in 2014.
A nice example of this leftward lurch could be the preoccupation of the Biden-era military with extreme theories about “white rage” and preferred pronoun use, even as the Army, Navy, and Air Force fall woefully short of recruiting goals. The Obama-era trend toward putting more women into combat now feels like a quaint debate from the distant past. Today, America isn’t progressing toward utopia until the Marines stop calling their superiors “Sir” and “Ma’am” and opt for something gender-neutral.
It is no accident that the Washington Post described Biden’s Cabinet appointments as “Obama era.” In the early stages of the presidential transition, NPR noted that 12 of Biden’s first 16 senior appointments were Obama administration alumni, including Alejandro Mayorkas, Antony Blinken, Susan Rice, Tom Vilsack, and eight others. Months later, USA Today reported that roughly three-quarters of Biden’s top 100 staffers had worked for Obama before him. In a town where personnel is policy, this is significant.
Days after the 2020 election, Biden laid out an agenda consisting almost entirely of the reinstatement and expansion of Obama-era rules and regulations that Trump had rescinded. This is where almost all the Biden administration’s energy has gone in the last three years.
Obama’s Paris climate agreement? Bring it back! Obama’s rule about independent contractors? About business franchises? About not disciplining nonwhite students in public schools? About dubious campus trials of students accused of sexual misconduct? About federal authority over wetlands? All of them have been disinterred.
These are just a few examples of many Obama rules either restored already, under litigation, or somewhere in the process of being brought back. While he’s at it, Biden has proposed in his budget to restore the divinely ordained 39.6% top marginal income tax rate — the one Obama signed into law in 2013.
Of course, the problem with copying an earlier presidency is the risk of falling out of touch with current circumstances.
Like Obama, Biden made his first legislative initiative a stimulus bill. But it took shape in a situation where stimulus made less sense than it had in Obama’s time. Say what you will about the faults of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, but it was a logical attempt to stoke production and get out from under a severe financial crisis and recession.
Biden’s American Recovery Plan stimulus, in contrast, came at the tail end of a pandemic recovery in which his predecessor had arguably already shoveled too much cash into an underproducing economy. The risk of inflation was obvious, a fact that some highly respected Democratic economists related to the president. Biden’s bill was also more than twice as big as Obama’s had been. This did not deter Biden from following in Obama’s footsteps, and he and the nation are still paying for it.
In two of the areas where executive power is arguably greatest, immigration and foreign policy, Biden has gone even further to turn the clock back a decade. He chose to restore the border crisis that Obama had struggled with in 2014, when the appearance of unaccompanied minors at the frontier quadrupled in just three years.
When Biden thoughtlessly scrapped Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers, the 2014 crisis simply resumed, for its cause lingered: the confluence of a 2008 federal law and a court precedent on the treatment of child migrants (and, by extension, their families) from countries other than Mexico. By putting out the “Welcome” sign once again and inviting exploitation of this 15-year-old loophole to anyone claiming asylum, Biden encouraged desert treks by children, human smuggling, and a new crisis in major cities, to say nothing of all the fentanyl-smuggling that mass migration is shielding from an overwhelmed Border Patrol. Unlike in Obama’s time, there is no struggle to fix the problem, only an urgent effort to process, release, and strand as many migrants as possible in South Texas.
This may be making the immigration problem great again for Trump.
The single event that has harmed Biden’s presidency most was also not a result of original thinking on his part. Obama and Trump had wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and both had created plans for withdrawal. Biden’s undoing was his very badly planned and poorly executed attempt to bring about a goal set by others.
As with so much in his administration, it is striking just how oblivious Biden seemed in summer 2021 about Afghanistan. He confidently told reporters in July that the odds that Kabul would be swiftly overrun by the advancing Taliban were “none whatsoever — zero.”
“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” he boasted.
Less than two months later, the Taliban overran everything. Eleven Marines, a soldier, and a sailor were killed. Hope for Afghanistan entered a death spiral from which it has not recovered, as did Biden’s approval ratings.
Finally, and most incomprehensibly, Biden insists on the Obama-era policy of putting “daylight” between the United States and Israel and our Sunni allies while pursuing friendship with an overtly hostile Iran.
The restoration of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was so important to Biden’s administration that, weeks after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the president’s team still desperately tried to woo Vladimir Putin, reassuring him that he remained a trusted partner in the Iran negotiations.
The Iran nuclear deal, already controversial in 2015, had become considerably more so by 2023. When Biden tried to unfreeze and release $6 billion in assets to Iran — it’s for humanitarian purposes only, trust the Iranians — he was offering to fund the country that had been supplying Russia with the Shahed drones raining death upon Ukrainian civilians for more than a year. Incidentally, that attempted release of funds represents another incremental upgrade over Obama, whose secret airlift of greenbacks to Tehran in January 2016 amounted to a comparatively paltry $400 million.
Even now, Biden’s administration and some of his media surrogates persist in the fiction that Iran cannot control its proxy groups and their suspiciously well-coordinated attacks all over the region upon Israel, American military targets, and Red Sea shipping. Could it be that they’re still hoping to get Obama’s deal back online? Old habits die hard.
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“This is not a third Obama term,” Biden insisted in a late November 2020 interview with Lester Holt. “We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration.”
That latter part is true. But Biden’s White House, with its warmed-over Obamaism, has not adapted to the times.
David Freddoso is deputy opinion editor of the Hill and author of The Case Against Barack Obama (August 2008).